Plus, my Spider-Man notes are outperforming anything I’ve ever done on this platform so maybe it’s a sign I can talk about it here.

Before I get started, a friendly reminder that you are allowed to disagree with me. This is my opinion and it’s not objective. Anyway.

1. Jean Grey is actually a villain and the movie wants us to forget that.

Jean Grey threw an innocent man into oncoming traffic simply to taunt Spider-Man. She drove a tank through the city, shooting at cars. She tricked Peter into kissing her as MJ while in MJ’s body, which is essentially double-sexual assault.

She hijacked people (including the Hulk) with no regard for them even though she could possess and see inside of them, see their thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears, and just treated them like meat shields.

I do not care that this was to find her sister and I think it’s honestly performative when people say ‘oh I would’ve done worse for my sister’. We are talking about innocent lives, innocent people who did nothing. I can read an interpretation that Jean Grey is only so cruel to Peter because he’s a ‘friend of Damage Control’ and therefore doesn’t trust him but enough is enough. She wasn’t being driven solely by actions to find her sister as evident by the fact that she basically went on a whole side quest to mess with Peter. She’s irredeemably cruel and shows no regret for any of her actions. When she screams out that Damage Control are murderers, it’s like, girl so are you!! And Peter saying ‘well you’re not a murderer, Jean’....YES SHE IS. MULTIPLE MURDERS. ATTEMPTED MURDER COUNTS.

Or maybe she’s not irredeemably cruel, but the movie didn’t do enough to redeem her.

Maybe, MAYBE, this could’ve all still worked if at the moment of the VMAX reveal (an excellent reveal, by the way) her first verbal reaction was not anger at Damage Control, but anger and frustration at herself because everything she had done up until that point, she had done for nothing. If she could’ve even just addressed that she in fact did horrible things to save her sister only to find out it was all for nothing…if she showed any self-awareness and any regret for what she had done instead of the ‘woe is me I’m all alone’. It’s like the movie doesn’t understand just how terrible what she did was. In fact, I think they actively don’t want us to, considering how many people I’ve spoken to forgot about the construction worker thrown into traffic. And the reason why they forgot?

2. This version of New York is populated by NPCs.

Spider-Man 2 has the famous train scene where, after saving everyone on a runaway train, a maskless and unconscious Peter is carried into the train by the passengers. They handle him carefully, realize aloud how young he is, and, when Peter wakes up and realizes he’s maskless, promise him that they’ll keep his identity a secret. It’s a beautiful, intimate moment between him and the people he risks everything to protect.

In The Amazing Spider-Man, there’s a scene where Peter is weakened and desperate and construction workers, recognizing him for all that he’s done to help them, work together to set up their cranes in such a way that he can more easily get himself across the city. It doesn’t have the intimacy of Spider-Man 2, but it shows that the people of New York have Spider-Man’s back.

Then there’s this movie, where we forgot that a construction worker was killed because what does he matter, he was an NPC.

There’s what feels like lip service to the idea that New York can help him with the news report about the hospital staff working to save Spider-Man after being shot but it’s not the same because we are so removed from what was going on in the hospital.

Here are some thoughts: when Frank brought Spider-Man into the hospital, why couldn’t we have heard Frank telling the workers not to remove Spider-Man’s mask, showing that Frank now finally respects that boundary. And then, of course, the staff has to remove it anyway but we could have a moment among the staff where they take it off and see a young man, and write on his intake form ‘John Doe’. Or we could skip over that but have a scene in the hospital where Peter has to interact with the hospital staff (vitals, food, etc). And there could be a way of showing how they talk to him as though he’s just a patient, a sort of ‘wink wink this is a secret, John Doe’, and we see how he accepts their help and knowledge about medical help and also that they are fully ready to keep his secret for him without any external pressure. It also would have been a great way to see Peter interact with people once again as just himself, which we were sorely lacking.

This leads me well enough to

3. Peter needs a job

Peter Parker is supposed to be broke. Somehow even though he doesn’t have a job he can afford rent and weekly flowers and takeout and all his technology. It became genuinely distracting that we don’t get any word as to where this money came from. We didn’t even get an ‘Avenger check/Tony Stark money’ throwaway line. Does he just have infinite money? I have multiple steady sources of income and I still worry about budgeting and saving. What’s his excuse?

And I don’t want to hear that he can’t have a job because he wouldn’t have the right paperwork since the world forgot Peter Parker because a) how is he renting then? And b) you can get under the table work.

I have not talked to the scriptwriters but I am pretty certain in my assertion that the only reason why we never see Peter with a job is because it would force him to socialize in some capacity as Peter with people who aren’t Ned and MJ. I really hate that already, for reasons that I’ll get into in the next point, but honestly? In the digital post-COVID age? Why can’t he have some shady job filling out surveys online? That could be a way to convey that he’s making money somehow while also giving him a really isolating, mind-numbingly depressing job. Show him logging in to answer dull surveys, occasionally checking his phone to cyberstalk Ned and MJ and wish he could be with them and their parties and fun etc. That could be a great way to establish how lonely and isolated he actually is, something they want us to know but don’t ever really show us.

Seriously. Picture him coming from a day as Spider-Man. He locks his apartment door, sits in front of his computer, and opens up some type of survey app. The apartment is dark and quiet. There’s a monotonous moment of him just clicking different answers. Outside his window, he hears a scream! He jumps up to check. It’s not danger though, it’s some college kids his age being drunk and silly together. He sits back down and continues clicking.

And now, number 4, my most controversial take.

So full disclosure, I saw Brand New Day with my nanny kids, and it was a lot of fun. But when we left the theater together, I gave them this take below and I think I genuinely angered them by it. I’m pretty sure one of them wanted to fight me over it. So here it is:

4. MJ and Ned should’ve been cut from the movie entirely because neither of them are characters in this movie.

Okay, the second part of that was a little harsh. But I am standing by and in fact doubling down that they shouldn’t have been in this movie from a writing standpoint aside from Peter cyberstalking them. I think a movie with him finally reuniting with them…needs to be its own movie. As it is, the prior movie asked us to care about this momentous sacrifice on Peter’s part, and then essentially backpedals immediately. It’s true that they don’t have their memories back or anything but it’s hard for me to feel like they perhaps moved on from Peter if they’re around so much. Even the things we’re told that are meant to imply that MJ moved on still have me, like…wait who’s this boyfriend? Why are you interested in him? What’s your day job, MJ? We get a line about how she hasn’t gotten a job yet because it was too corporate for her but I’d really love to hear more specifics then about how she’s making money to afford rent instead of just a broad principled stance that doesn’t actually convey anything significant or groundbreaking to me.

What is MJ even up to day-to-day? Something I loved about the Raimi Mary Jane was that she would disappear from the screen and it turns out she was actually doing something the entire time she was gone. Genuinely, if I had split screen of what Mary Jane was doing in the Spider-Man trilogy alongside Peter’s arc, we actually could say definitely what Mary Jane was doing. Everyone hates her because she’s not as nice and supportive as Gwen Stacy or MJ, but at least she has a clearly defined life outside of Peter.

The movie’s runtime was already pretty long and I think it desperately needed more time to flesh out the New Yorkers and New York as a character, and more about Jean Grey so the sister reveal wouldn’t be so left-field. That could’ve easily been established by cutting MJ and Ned from the movie. It also, incidentally, would’ve meant Jean Grey wouldn’t have possessed MJ and tricked Peter into kissing her and then thrown MJ off a building (and again, I’m supposed to feel bad for Jean?)

The movie felt like it meandered too long in some scenes and flew over others. The movie definitely had strengths- the VMAX reveal, Frank and Peter’s chemistry and banter, Tom Holland’s performance- but the writing constantly skipped the dramatic material that really could’ve made the movie land. Peter’s supposed to be isolated but we skip most of his mundane existence. The hospital staff is actively protecting Peter, but we skip that as well. MJ can move on but the movie skips over the life she apparently moved into. Jean can be sympathetic after doing horrific things, but we skip the reckoning.

I love that compliment until I don’t, because when I don’t feel happy, I feel like I’m letting them down. I feel needy and childish and I imagine people’s sympathy at max capacity; ‘oh, this again.’

When people compliment me by saying I seem happy, I feel sort of like a self-cleaning oven. It’s like there’s a containment factor, no one needs to worry, I’m fine, I’ve got it. When happiness is attributed to things- a much-needed breakup, a new job, a general life change- it feels like I’m breaking the rules by saying I’m still not happy. Or maybe not so much that I’m breaking the rules but that I must be looking for something to be upset about. I’ve joked before to friends that chronic anxiety means I need something to fixate on or I’ll die but…

I don’t think I’m making these feelings up. It can still feel performative though, it’s never-ending quality. When my mom died, I was told that the first year is always the hardest. I remember thinking, how can you put a tagline on grief like that? Now, two years later, I would argue that the first year was hard but it wasn’t the hardest. In fact, I’d argue it gets harder every day, the further away you get because the further away you are, the harder it is to explain why you’re not used to it. Things will never go back to what they were; even worse, you have to confront that things could never and now will never be the way you wanted them to be. And you just have to keep going.

You’d think that being aware of all of these feelings would help in some way, bring you clarity and thus close to a conclusion. But it just leaves you feeling stuck in dull misery, stuck in yourself. And sometimes you find yourself suddenly wanting a fresh wound to point to, to explain away all of your feelings. Having close proximity to the event makes it so much for everyone to understand, yourself included.

In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion writes, “we imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place….we have no way of knowing that the funeral itself…. we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know…the difference between grief was we imagine it and grief as it is… the unending absence that follows.”

When people observe that I seem happy, I know it’s meant to be a compliment- look at how you’ve got your life together, how you’re creating a life you want to have, how far you’ve come. And when they say that, when I feel happy in that moment, I feel proud. But then when I’m upset, I don’t know a safe person to bring that grief too since after all, if I let them I’m unhappy, it feels like I’m breaking a promise that I ever had it together at all.

I don’t know what you’re supposed to do when you run out of socially acceptable reasons to be sad. Sometimes I’m happy but the sadness feels so much more honest, and so much more shameful.

At this point I’ve written quite a bit about being from Rockaway Beach, New York. I’m a coastal native, and at times I feel very trapped living in a landlocked state.

There are times I see the mountains when I’m driving at sunset, when they have that blue silhouette against the dusky golden shadows. It softens their edges and stops the terrain from looking so stark. When I go hiking, I do like being in the pine-covered parts of the mountains. They aren’t lush like the coastal forests, but they have a dusty charm.

But I miss the ocean every day. I miss swimming in it, diving under the waves, and I miss standing on the edge and watching the water stretch on and on. And when it’s over a hundred degrees, like it’s been in Colorado the past few days, I just feel miserable. People say dry heat isn’t that bad, or that it’s not as bad as humidity. I say that humid heat is hard to breathe in, but dry heat is unbearable. When I step outside, I feel like I’m roasting.

This weather isn’t even normal for Colorado, according to the Colorado natives. We shouldn’t have a smoke season, which we’ve had every year that I’ve lived here. It shouldn’t climb into the 90s regularly, but it does. This past year has been unrelentingly hot. In March, I hosted a party with an Italian Mafia theme (I’m part Italian, I’m allowed to do that) and when I made the plans I thought it would be snowy outside and the kitchen would be nice and warm with the smells of pasta puttenesca and garlic bread. Instead it was in the 80s, and I was trying to reclaim glamor by cooking in a slip but it was goddamn hot, and we ate on the back patio because no one could stand the heat.

I really hate the heat. At least when you live on the coast, you can always throw yourself in the ocean. When I lived in Rockaway I used to go swimming every day from April to October. I think about moving to Oregon semi-regularly, and I’ve been warned that the ocean there is very cold. I’ve only visited the Oregon coast in the winter, so I can’t say for certain but I’m pretty sure I could handle it. I like when the ocean is cold and I hate it when the mountains are hot.

I think I’m partially so bitter because I feel trapped here, in a way that’s a bit difficult to explain. Basically I feel trapped because I have friends here that I care about and I do things a lot and I have a job here and a car here and I’m pretty settled. And also I feel like I can’t move back to New York again. I’d love to but I feel like I can’t. I left home and I feel like returning would be admitting some defeat and unfortunately, something I dislike about myself, is that I really care about what other people think.

2. I don’t have the highest self-esteem but sometimes I feel good about myself

As established, I care what people think about me. I wish to God that I didn’t but I do. I don’t necessarily mean that the whole of my self-worth is defined by other people but it sure would help if people thought good things about me. On a certain level I’m emotionally intelligent enough to know that you ultimately can’t control what other people think about you. But my base instinct is that I try hard enough, I can.

I think part of why I enjoyed being a teacher for as long as I did was because I enjoyed the emotional fulfillment of helping students and seeing their thanks and love returned. I guess it’s fair to say that that’s also a sign of covert narcissism. Sometimes I wonder whether I actually liked teaching because I loved teaching or because twenty-five middle schoolers made me feel necessary every day.

Here’s a story from the teaching days: once during lunch, two of my students came down in terrible moods, angry and trying not to cry and mad at each other. It was science fair week and tensions were high. I was on lunch duty with the math/science teacher and we made eye contact, and decided to check in on them. Then the math/science teacher couldn’t, because he was called by another student for help, so I went to check on both students separately. Essentially there was miscommunication and fighting and they were treating the stakes of this as though it were the Geneva convention. I don’t quite remember what I said to them, but I do remember feeling very satisfied when I made them smile with a comment, and feeling good when they made up with each other.

Another quick story: once a student was crying and upset before they had to get on stage for a school play. They were upset because they thought they looked ridiculous in their costume, and felt like everyone was laughing at them. Another teacher who worked more closely with the play was a bit frustrated and told the student to stop moping. I spoke to the student privately and told them that I thought they looked beautiful and, when they rolled their eyes, I added that I knew that hearing that meant nothing if they didn’t feel it themselves. And when they smiled and hugged me and thanked me for being there, I felt very happy.

And then there are other times where students were upset and I tried to talk to them and give them words of encouragement and when they didn’t react or just ignored me, I felt very discouraged in a way that I wasn’t particularly proud to admit, in a way that made me wonder if it was really about helping them or helping some part of me that needed to prove that I was important and useful and necessary through them.

The word ‘narcissism’ has been thrown around so much it’s basically diluted its meaning into just ‘person I don’t like’. But a true narcissist- in its most pure form, going back to the man, the myth, the legend Narcissus who wasted his life staring at his reflection- is someone excessively preoccupied with themselves, their appearance, and their own interests. It’s generally understood that narcissism is born as a type of defense mechanism. Many narcissists have a very unstable view of themselves and many are overcompensating the idea of their goodness and value because they weren’t validated enough when they were young and needed it.

My constant desire to be validated in life sometimes worries me.

3. Some statements are true but aren’t given the nuance they afford.

Does anyone remember when ‘people-pleasing is manipulation’ was discourse? And many people immediately defended people-pleasing because it’s often a defense mechanism as the result of abuse?

Does anyone remember above, when I said that narcissism is often a defense mechanism as a result of not having a secure identity?

I do think that people-pleasing is manipulative behavior, the same way I think of my desire to control what people think of me as someone manipulative. I mean, let me put on my English teacher hat for a moment and breakdown the word ‘manipulative’ to its core meaning:

Prefix: none

Root: Man/manu, meaning hand and Plere, to fill or handle

Suffix: -Ive, meaning a quality, relationship, or tendency to perform an action

Altogether class: ‘manipulative’s literal word meaning is

The definition comes to mean having a hand, so to speak, in how a relationship is understood. The Oxford dictionary defines it as ‘someone who cleverly, unfairly, or unscrupulously influences the behavior, emotions, or decisions of others to serve their own personal interests.’

Why does that make someone a bad person, or at least make them unworthy of being considered good?

I don’t think people-pleasers are malicious. I think they’re trying to quietly control the emotional climate with the mentality that ‘if everyone likes me, then no one can hurt me.’

I don’t think it’s productive to view people as being good or bad. It might be a bit of my Catholic upbringing coming into question, but I think that for the most part people aren’t usually knowingly nefarious. To quote Dostoyevsky (sorry, I’m reading The Brothers Karamazov) “As a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naive and simple-hearted than we supposed. And we ourselves are, too.”

What I like about this quote is that it doesn’t assert that ultimately all people are good. But there is something to be said about the fact that many people don’t realize the harm they’re inflicting, because they’re just acting.

Where’s that tiktok audio, ‘well maybe you don’t remember it because for me it was super traumatizing and for you it was just Wednesday?’

I don’t think most people are intentionally acting badly. I think most people relate to the song “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” (sorry, I’m a very referential person): I’m just a soul, whose intentions are good. Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.

But what are good intentions?

4. I just wanna go home, man.

I mean, I am home. I’m in my tree-house apartment, as I like to call it, the top floor surrounded by greenery and my cats are sleeping in front of me and things aren’t that bad. But it’s weird. Things are objectively fine but I feel like I’m holding my breath, waiting for something. I feel this defense mechanism that I don’t enjoy having, that says ‘reject everything, be unbothered and say ‘I don’t care’ at the first sign of conflict, conflict that’s probably mostly in my head. I agreed to hike a fourteener next weekend (so Colorado of me) and I already want to back out and I’m imagining my friend being mad at me for canceling and how maybe it’d be best if I had this this ‘whatever I don’t care’ attitude towards them being mad at me for canceling because why do they care so much about me doing this thing? But then I think about everything I literally just wrote and I guess there’s something there about feeling uncomfortable with the idea that people actually want you in ways that are inconvenient. It’s definitely some type of defense mechanism, that I don’t know what to do with people wanting me in ways I’m not excited to show up for. Somewhere along the line I felt safe knowing that it was easy to leave so when someone expects me to stay for a hike, for dinner, for a conversation, for whatever, I instinctively want to run before they can decide I’m not worth keeping around after all.

It’s a weird tension, wanting desperately to belong somewhere and simultaneously wanting to escape the moment belonging asks something of you.

For a while I used to say that horror was my favorite genre and that’s not exactly untrue. However it’s not exactly traditional horror that pulls me, and supernatural horrors are usually my least favorite, with some extreme exceptions. The thing I like about horror is more of the feeling of living in horror. I’m not sure if I mean the mood or the atmosphere. What I am sure that I mean is that the stories I like most- in books, films, television, video-games, any format for stories, really- are about coming-of-age in a world marked by horror, be it familiar, psychological, supernatural, or societal. It’s where the horror isn’t the event so much as the environment, where characters have to learn who they are in a world that’s already gone wrong, where the protagonist tries to make sense of an adult world they didn’t create.

I worked at a pretty intense Catholic school for two years and in that time, I heard a lot of strong opinions against horror; how it’s ‘satanic’, how it ‘corrupts the youth’, and some other things that felt loosely paraphrased from the Supreme Court’s official definition of pornography: prurient interest, patently offensive, and lacking value. I found it very interesting to be in an environment that banned The Giver and A Series of Unfortunate Events because of its negative portrayal of adults, when I was in the same environment who continuously praised C.S Lewis. C.S. Lewis, the same man who famously wrote “since it is so likely that (children) will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.”

My favorite type of horror stories don’t really invent horror. They simply acknowledge reality, a reality that much of the world feels hostile or otherwise indifferent. There’s VC Andrews and Stephen King and The Little Girl Who Lived Down the Lane, but there’s also Sharp Objects and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Hunger Games.

I feel a kinship to characters who are alone. Maybe that’s why I preferred Sunrise on the Reaping over The Hunger Games; a world where everyone disappears and our character becomes surrounded by ghosts feels a lot more relatable to me.

I became the protagonist in someone else’s story in a very strange way when I was seventeen. I was not exactly alone at that age- I had a romantic friendship with my best friend (didn’t we all?) I taught piano to children in my neighborhood, worked part-time at the neighborhood pizzeria, and adored my piano teacher.

But I didn’t go to my senior year of high school. I spent a lot of time hanging out at the mall or wandering the beach, or writing a massive novel about a friend group with a lot of drama and bad parents. My sisters were out of the house, my parents were divorced, and my mom was not exactly present or reliable. When she was home, she was in a bad mood and usually accompanied by a boyfriend. Sometimes she left me alone at the house for days at a time while she went on trips which was mostly fine with me. The one I remember being annoyed was because it had snowed and my mom called from Florida to tell me that I had to shovel the snow before we got a ticket. I called up the boys I worked with at the pizzeria and asked them to do it for me in exchange for hot chocolate.

Around this time, Mom started renting out the attic apartment. There was one couple we rented too, that I remember speaking to exactly one time when they were touring the place; I later found out that the tenant had become inspired by me, inspired to write a story about me. According to them, living in our house felt like living in The Virgin Suicides. They broke up while they were renting, and the woman said that she thought our whole house was cursed.

She wrote a story about living in our house, about the landlord- my mother- who was some divine combination of Madame Bovary and Joan Crawford. I was presented as the Lux Lisbon/Mary Lisbon-type. Specifically, she wrote me as the beautiful young daughter that ‘floated’ around the house in lacy dresses, was the target of my mother’s frustrations, and was found over the house in stairwells on the roof etc just reading books, boys meeting in the backyard, sprawled on the terrace outside my room. There’s a certain unwritable weirdness when you get to see yourself framed as a romanticized protagonist that is fated to die

I remembered learning about the tenant who I cannot for the life of me actually visualize (I remember her boyfriend better) writing this story through my cousin- in a Dickensian type of happenstance, they were all friends but didn’t know the connection to me until years later- and feeling like I was in my own strange story. Someone I don’t even remember watched and observed me, interpreted my movements, mythologized me, and translated my own life into Gothic fiction.

This was my small-scale ‘Cat Person’ debacle: is it ethical to turn another person’s life into art?

I’ve seen many writers discuss this, often fervently defending their right to do so. It’s often framed as them telling the story of someone they antagonize. I don’t really have a clear answer myself, but I just find it very interesting that someone looked into my own teenage life and saw neglect, alcoholism, and instability, and interpreted it as its own kind of beauty. I was in my bedroom writing fiction about struggling teenagers, and someone upstairs was writing fiction about me.

I love stories with protagonists like Cathy Dollanganger, Camille Preaker, and Heather Mason. I realize that beyond trauma, they all have something else in common, the fact that their identities had been presupposed by other adults. Cathy is literally imprisoned inside an attic because of the identity her family imposes as the ‘devil’s spawn.’ Camille cuts herself to release the anxieties forced upon her by her abusive mother. Heather grows up inside a destiny she didn’t choose. Katniss fits this dilemma, Haymith too. The Lisbon sisters fit, as does Rynn Jacobs. They’re all resisting narratives written by older people.

As I write that, I think about how my upstairs never really met me. She interpreted me as a Lisbon daughter, and envisioned me instantly as a doomed archetype, a symbol of emotional neglect.

I guess I like stories about people who fight for their interiority to be known.

I think I’ve always been drawn to stories that weren’t simply horror stories; I think I was searching for characters who try so hard to escape becoming symbols.

And there’s something very honest to me about the idea that they never truly, fully escape.

Then I have a side that is still desperate to be published, to be integrated into the writing community, to have an audience that wants to read my stories.

The temptation is to frame this as art versus validation. But it’s not really that for me, at least I don’t think it is, so much as it’s wanting to have proof that I exist.

As I write this, I feel very alone and very childish. I’ve also wondered if the perpetual crisis in identity is less to do with an inability to define my own sense of self so much as it’s a need to be seen and recognized as this sense of self.

I recently turned twenty-eight and I’ve realized that I feel like I’m twenty-eight years old plus all the years I wish I could get back.

I wasted college being too cautious because of family drama and I wasted my early twenties on covid lockdowns and developing OCD spirals. Twenty-four to twenty-seven were still defined by family drama and OCD, but I’d also started to develop a life that I actually really enjoyed. Then I turned twenty-eight amidst certain changes and I’m left wondering what happened to the life I was going to have.

I spent much of my life thinking that I wanted to be a teacher. Well, actually no, I wanted to be an actress first. I remember really wanting to be a child actress back in fifth grade, and even going so far as to get headshots and go on some auditions. But I never booked any roles and I have told people it’s because as a child I wasn’t conventionally pretty enough- I had an underbite that was surgically corrected when I was seventeen- but it also might have been that I’m not a very good actress. Or maybe I just didn’t go to enough auditions. All I know for certain is that I didn’t make it as an actress and then I pursued piano further but have crippling stage fright for playing piano in front of other people. Very weird type of stage fright because I don’t get that way for public speaking, acting, or public readings. But with piano, I just can’t perform in front of other people.

Besides that aspiration to be an actress, I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom. When I eventually decided in late high school that I wanted to be a teacher, I was in part picking that profession because I was picking something that seemed more aligned with a child’s schedule for when I eventually had kids. I spent my twenties pursuing my teaching license and my masters degree and I taught for several years and that aspiration crashed and burned on me.

What gets to me is that when I describe to people how I am envious of a certain former friend my age who is currently married with two children, and who is a stay-at-home mom with a successful husband, I’m told that I’m not like her because I’m more ‘career oriented’. Which, first of all, it’s so bizarre that people have the audacity to tell you that you don’t know yourself better than they do and second of all, isn’t even true: I’m not career oriented. I was not someone trying to climb the corporate ladder or had an elaborate plan to conquer administration or anything like that. I was just trying to make the best choice with what options I saw were before me.

I’ve always wanted to be a mother. I don’t know if it’s going to happen but it’s something I’ve wanted. And because that’s something I’ve wanted, I’ve seen people pull away from me. For example, I had a former friend tell me that they didn’t have the space for my friendship because we don’t share her values of anti-natalism. On a softer example, I had a child-free friend joke to me and another friend who is already a mother that ten years from now, she’ll be traveling the world and we’ll be staying at home with our kids.

It was just a joke but I really had to hide that I was hurt, because I’m not a mother. I don’t have anything to indicate that I will have children in the near future. When that joke had been made, I’d just gotten out of a two-year relationship. I’m admittedly bothered by the fact that there’s a chance I’ll never be a mother and I’ll have to make peace with that, when at the same time that desire is being given as both inevitable and disqualifying.

It makes me wish I’d kept that part of my life to myself, not because I was ashamed of it, but because once people knew it, they seemed to think they knew everything else about me too.

Teaching was a socially legible identity but it crashed and burned on me after about three years. I wound up leaving my final position midyear- something I’d never thought I would do, but also never saw myself mentally in the place I was when I decided to- and everybody and their mother gave me grief over leaving because I should’ve stuck it out, because this is what teaching is and it’s what I signed up for, so on, and so forth.

I couldn’t do it. I tried, I put a lot into it, and I couldn’t do it.

And it really frustrates me because I feel that when I was a teacher, people had little respect for my career (all the comments about the days off and the contract hours and the summers etc etc) and now that I’m a full-time nanny, they really don’t respect my situation. When I was with friends recently, we all discussed how we feel like none of us make enough money, and I made the least amount at the table. When I realized that I was instantly told that I should basically be grateful because I have the least stressful job.

What bothered me wasn’t even the comparison itself. It was the speed with which my concerns were dismissed, as though I wasn’t serious enough to have my situation considered. I really hate when people narrate my life to me, and show how easily it allows them to dismiss me.

It’s true that I should count myself lucky that I have a job that pays well and allows me the mental energy to write again. But that just brings itself back to the question of what do I even do with my writing anymore? Should I try rewriting my original series and look to get it published again? Should I fix up the story I wrote in the Silent Hill universe so it’s not in the Silent Hill universe? Should I be wary to admit here that I’m planning those steps at all?

I frequently get the impression that nobody really wants to hear from me. On days with lower self-esteem, I think about how I don’t make enough of a difference in anyone’s life to really matter. But I know-intellectually, at least- that that’s a self-defensive mechanism, an offshoot of abandonment issues, that tries to convince you that nobody cares anyway so you shouldn’t bother caring. It’s just anxiety framing itself as moral clarity. Knowing that doesn’t really quiet that voice, though.

It especially doesn’t help that sometimes that defensive-apathy really does help rejection sting less. If I could not care at all about whether I’d ever be a published writer, if I could not care about having a career that impresses people and if I could not care about if I’ll have my own family, I tell myself that I’d probably be happier.

Still I can’t stop myself from wanting these things, maybe because part of me sees it as proof that I exist to myself. And maybe I want these things because I am getting tired of trying to produce evidence that I exist at all.

Lately the inside of my head is an overstimulating, nightmarish vortex. Thoughts circle between hating myself, hating everyone else, being wildly defensive and on the offense, hesitantly exploratory and then immediately repulsed and critical. I imagine an immediate backlash or even just a pushback to any thought I have (a story idea, a narrative essay, etc) and want to annihilate it. Writers block is one word for it and low-grade depression is probably another.

Basically, I struggle to write, and then I get an idea of something I want to explore in writing, and I stop the moment it gets tricky, the moment I get confused about what I’m trying to say, the moment I picture an audience ready to tell me that whatever I’m trying to say is asinine, is pretentious, is insignificant and self-absorbed, and that I’m thinking too much about myself (iconic meme, is not doing the best things to my self-esteem right now.)

I guess because I don’t write for anyone, don’t have a community that wants something from me, it feels like anything I bring to the table is some sort of unsolicited appeal.

Sometimes I feel like there’s this tiny voice inside of me, the remnants of my teenage self that’s still hurting, still lonely, still reaching, and I feel a softness towards her for one second before I feel repulsed by her. Bad things have happened to everyone, escape the victim mindset, but I don’t even know if it’s a victim mindset or just something I need to cultivate into something stronger or what.

Even writing this I’m starting to get overwhelmed and tired of myself. Sometimes it feels like pushing on a bruise in hopes I’ll start crying, sometimes it feels like performing pain. And then I wonder, why am I so enraged at the concept of performing pain, as though that makes pain any less sincere? Then I wonder if karma is real and if I’m paying the price for something terrible I must have done and then I get mad at myself because I know I’m relishing in the same self-pity I’ve always hated.

So while I continue to struggle to write, or even just make my thoughts more manageable, I guess I’ll leave this here.

In another piece of writing, I said my identity feels intrinsically tied to creation. What I didn’t say is that my identity also feels often like something assigned externally

I don’t even know if I look more like my mothers side or my father’s. I used to think about my fathers side, and my mother treated that observation like an abusive statement. In that moment, I learned that identity could signify your loyalty, and to name yourself risked hurting someone else.

Sometimes when I think of it, I think I look like my mom, or at least a good cross between my parents. But then, I’m told otherwise. I’m often told I look more Lebanese than anything else, until I suggest that myself. Then I’m told I look Italian, which is my mother’s side, but also that I look like my father’s side, which is Lebanese. I guess it’s easier to pretend I don’t look like anyone.

I identify as Catholic as long as other Catholics aren’t around me. Or I commiserate with lapsed Catholics/non-practicing Catholics, the Cradle Catholics that walk a tightrope between reverence and rebellion. But around atheist friends, the desire to hold onto that culture becomes damning. And I don’t really believe in the resurrection, so I’m fundamentally not even Catholic. I want to be in the middle, but religious identity feels like it’s a zero-sum situation, where claiming one thing means to erase the other.

I don’t eat meat and that can be treated like I’m trying to be difficult around meat-eaters, while conversely treated like I’m not doing enough for vegans to be satisfied.

I’m Caucasian, and I’ve always wanted to be around people with Middle Eastern ancestry and culture like me. Yet at the same time, I can’t move past the feeling I was secretly infiltrating spaces that aren’t meant for me.

I know they say you can’t please everybody, but it sure would be nice to please one person. Sometimes I’m not even sure I qualify as that one person.

I realize that together this is turning an issue of identity as being tied to performing for an audience. It feels like identity shifts depending on who’s watching, and I’m constantly left wondering, who am I allowed to be in front of this person? Identity stops being internal; instead it’s a social negotiation.

Take me as I am, I want to say, and don’t make me need such strong convictions on things I’m not sure about. But being so undefined feels like some type of deception, to the people around me, and even to myself.

It’s really worrying how stable your sense of self is, when that identity is always externally negotiated and never internally settled. And sometimes I worry that I’ll never actually become someone I can fully stand behind.

I left Rockaway before I was ready to, because of circumstances I couldn’t control. Since then, I’ve wondered when I would have left, if it was my choice. I wonder sometimes if I would’ve stayed forever, like most everyone there. There’s something about Rockaway that holds onto the past and makes it part of the future.

Most people don’t know where Rockaway is. It’s a tiny peninsula off of Queens, so small you could easily cover it with your finger on a map. It’s part of New York City, but never feels like it. The neighborhood I’m from, Belle Harbor, is even smaller. It’s length is under .9 miles, it’s width is roughly .2 miles, and you could easily walk end-to-end in fifteen minutes. It’s mostly home to generations of Irish-Catholic families. The Irish-American identity is very strong; at the parochial school most children attend, everyone is at least part Irish. I myself am more Lebanese than Irish, and my best friend growing up was half New Guinea, half Irish, and culturally all we ever talked about was being Irish.

There’s a determination to cling to Irish heritage despite most everyone’s families being in America for generations. The determination to cling to being Irish despite being American feels similar to how Rockaway has a determination to be part of the city even though it’s for all intents and purposes a small coastal town. Everyone wants to hold onto a story about themselves.

Growing up I never felt like I fit in with Rockaway. By the time I left I didn’t feel like I fit in either. But I loved it so much anyway, parts of it. I loved the sea-salt air, and the sky after a rainstorm. I loved the seagulls and the way Saint Francis’s church bells always rang at 6:00 pm, resounding through the town. I loved walking to the bakery on 129th and paying for a coffee and sprinkled cookies in quarters. I liked being close to my grandma and grandpa’s house. I especially loved walking through my neighborhood, especially before dawn, when no one was up, and going to the beach at the brink of sunrise. The sun would turn the sky crimson and reflect gold and amber on the ocean. It was like watching a fire explode, its embers scattered across choppy black waves. Then, first slowly but then suddenly, the sky would change to baby blue and the gold would lighten to nearly white.

I loved the peculiarities about Rockaway. There was the abandoned Neponsit Beach Hospital right on the beach, the most surreal sunbathing spot. The Wise Clock in Riis Park, bringing books to read on the rocky jetties during the off-seasons, exploring the old bunkers in Fort Tilden. Most of all, I loved that there was something about Belle Harbor itself that I saw in me, the thing that was antediluvian and a bit out of sync with the rest of the world.

We didn’t have a movie theater or a book store or a Starbucks. Even though we were part of New York City, we only had two bus lines and the A train. Rockaway has a striking view of the Manhattan Skyline on the bay, and there’s something comforting about that distance and proximity all at once.

Five years after I left Rockaway, I enrolled in Bennington College’s MFA program. During that time I found out about Jill Eisenstadt, a Bennington alum who also grew up in Rockaway Beach. In fact, her novel was called From Rockaway and was about my mother’s generation of Rockaway teens, in that tension of being eighteen and not sure where you’re going.

I decided to read it.

I’ve reread this book at least four times and I don’t know how I feel about this book. I currently have my mom’s funeral prayer card, of the sunset over the ocean, as a bookmark for it but more on that later. Every time I reread it I’m struck with the same nonplussed reaction.

Parts of the book are incredibly nostalgic: the streets, St Francis, the beach at all seasons. I’ve wondered how some settings would read to someone who’d never been to Rockaway, since it was less descriptive and more referential. But what struck me most about the book was that it didn’t feel like there was a lot of love for Rockaway, only contempt.

And there is a lot to not like about Rockaway. I was missing it above but I’ll say some things now: Rockaway is very narrow, and until you hit the beach it can feel incredibly claustrophobic. Many people are distrusting at best. The generations that live there make it so that you can never escape where you came from. It can feel like less of a place and more of a container for overlapping lives. There’s something about Rockaway that traps memories of the past and makes them part of the future.

However the contempt in From Rockaway seems to stem from the way people are content to stay in ‘Rotaway’. They go to CUNY for college, or else they become a cop or a firefighter and stay in the neighborhood and eventually inherit their family house.

The book follows a small ensemble cast that are all roughly the same myth of the ‘local’: the athletes that went to crazy parties in Fort Tilden every weekend, who can surf and play soccer and hold their beer. It’s a crowd that’s real, but I wasn’t a part of it. From local gossip, I don’t think the author was either. One of my friend’s dad, who was the working class lifeguard she was writing about, knew her personally. He said she’d hang around the lifeguards and described her as “an unemployed uptown princess.” My mother went to high school with the author, calling her ‘the girl whose grandfather invented Sweet N Low, and describing how they lived on the beach block. She later mentioned reading the book and not liking it, but didn’t clarify that it was by the same classmate.

I think what can be off-putting about the story is that the tone seems like it has contempt for the people that don’t leave. I’ve been wondering, though, if the contempt isn’t judgment so much as a displaced jealousy. Belonging in Rockaway is real, but it’s not evenly distributed.

I know my mom, who lived in Rockaway for over fifty years, didn’t like it much. She was not Irish at all, but Lebanese and Italian. I know she wanted to be an actress and a model and pianist and anything art-adjacent in Manhattan. Instead she received her license to practice law and wound up living in a house three blocks away from her childhood home. By the time she died, she’d finally left Rockaway for Florida, but the funeral was in Rockaway. Rockaway has a way of pulling you back, like the ocean current. Her high school boyfriend came by and left their prom glass on the table with her urn and photos.

Being back was surreal in the way that it didn’t feel like I’d been gone at all.

Rockaway is made up of memories, and it’s a place about inheritance: inherited houses, inherited reputations, inherited stories, and inherited narratives about the place.

When I think about Rockaway, I see a place that doesn’t leave you.

I think it’s hard to write about Rockaway. I’ve always wanted to, but I never really know what there is to say. Some people complained that the book was plotless, but I’d argue Rockaway itself is pretty plotless. Life doesn’t necessarily meander but it rolls like ocean waves. It’s cyclical

Rockaway isn’t just a place people choose to stay in. It’s a place that keeps people, even after they leave. What makes writing about it so difficult is that any attempt to write about Rockaway reduces it to just a setting, missing the deeper, almost haunting force of the place itself.

I enjoyed the movie a lot, especially Hiccup. I’ve always felt somewhat maternal instincts towards any character that Mason Thames plays ever since I saw the first Black Phone, maybe because Finney and Hiccup are both motherless boys. Mason Thames has the right vibe to carry a character like Hiccup, sort of elfish and gentle. If I would cast him in another fairy tale type movie, it would be The Black Cauldron.

All that got me thinking how I always feel so drawn to that type of character: Not the leading man or the dashing prince, more like the strangely pretty, seemingly delicate boy who wants to and ultimately conquers a massive evil. I’m not sure what that archetype is called exactly, so I’ll refer to it from hereon as ‘the gentle son.’ This gentle son leaves more of an impact on me than the warrior girl or the pretty princess. I’m not a boy and I never thought of myself as someone who rejected traditional femininity. Growing up, I loved dress-up games like Pretty Pretty Princess, I loved Disney princesses, and I adored the color pink. I always understood myself as somewhat ordinary in how stereotypically girly I was.

And yet the character I feel so drawn to is the gentle son.

The Wendy vs. Peter Pan tension is basically a cultural fault line about what boys and girls are expected to become. In the story Peter Pan, the roles available to Wendy are very clear: be the caretaker and the mother of the boys. Meanwhile Peter Pan gets to remain free-spirited, fight pirates, and live in adventure. Wendy’s arc is domestic and relational, while Peter’s arc is existential and mythic.

The gentle son gets to sit somewhere between those two poles. He’s not the carefree eternal child like Peter but he also isn’t forced into the caretaker role like Wendy.

Aside from Wendy, the female archetypes are usually boiled down as ‘the princess’, ‘the martyr’, and ‘the romantic love interest.’ None of them well enough capture inherited rage, moral struggle, or identity forged against parental damage. That’s not to say that there aren’t stories of difficult mother/daughter relationships in pop culture, but that they rarely demonstrate maternal malice. They instead focus on grief, neglect, role reversal, or incompatible survival strategies, and fall under what I’ll call ‘the sadness model’, where mother and daughter are estranged by circumstance, damage, or differing ways of suffering. Some of the most popular stories of the 2010s depict this, such as The Hunger Games, where Katniss Everdeen and Mrs Everdeen are both grieving the death of Burdock Everdeen. After his unexpected death, Katniss becomes prematurely adult as Mrs Everdeen is essentially a shell of herself. The wound between them is abandonment, not cruelty. Twilight, another famous series, shows Bella Swan and Renée having a similar dynamic, where Bella is functionally the steadier one, parentified daughter, and Renée is loving but flighty.

Neither of these depictions have a sense of cruelty, vindictiveness, or outright abusiveness. The feeling is weary sadness, embarrassment, maybe muted anger, but not all consuming rage.

VC Andrew novels are the exception; specifically Cathy Dollanganger/Corrine Dollanganger.

One thing uncomfortable about the mother/daughter relationship is that given how women are treated in society, women are more often seen as competing sexual enemies for the same man who would take both mother and daughter in a heart beat, because youth is valued as the pinnacle of beauty for a woman. This means mothers and daughters are framed not as lineage but as rivals. Cathy and Corrine are female rage that isn’t primarily framed as trauma from male violence. Cathy Dollanganger is one of the few female characters allowed the emotional territory normally given to the “rebellious son.”

VC Andrews writes what I’ll call ‘the rage model’, where mother and daughter are not just wounded, but placed in a charged field of betrayal, competition, humiliation, and deliberate emotional violence. That’s where Cathy and Corrine become singular. Cathy’s anger is not just “you failed me,” as much as it is “you betrayed me, replaced me, and made me feel that femininity itself is treacherous.”

Bruce Springsteen has a famous song, “Adam Raised a Cain”. It feels like the b-side of “Cats Cradle”, where the quiet tragedy of emotional absence turns into an explosive confrontation with inherited suffering.

In “Adam Raised a Caine”, Springsteen sings “well daddy worked his whole life for nothing but the pain and now he walks these empty rooms looking for something to blame”. At another point he goes ‘“the same hot blood running in our veins’’ and “you’re born into this life paying for the sins of somebody else’s past.”

The son gets to angst that ‘I inherited your damage’/ ‘We both resent each other for how life turned out’/ ‘I am still bound to you by blood.’ It encapsulates the emotions running through the rage model. But the way women and girls are sidelined in these male centric narratives of the patriarchy makes it impossible to specify that. It can make claiming the exact same relationship as the male equivalent such as in this song feels like being a fraud, but all the same it feels so right: inherited suffering, generational anger, and bloodline conflict.

The gentle son can feel the tension of the Springsteen narrative but avoids the sexualized competition dynamic of the mother/daughter. The gentle son is shown as not the same type as the adult men around him. Visually, he’s often delicate, small, almost androgynous. It’s not just that he’s morally gentle, but that isn’t physically coded as the kind of masculinity that dominates or competes. He exists outside that system a little, which makes him a kind of liminal character, not quite child, not quite man, and liminal characters are often where people place complicated feelings that don’t fit established categories. He also retains a kind of emotional openness that patriarchal masculinity usually punishes. His story is the story about the loss of that innocence while still choosing to fight the evil anyway.

Similarly, the realization that the mother who was supposed to love you most either couldn’t or didn’t, is its own death of childhood innocence.

The mother/daughter story has a trap built into it. Culturally we’re told two things at the same time:

1. A mother’s love for her children is the most natural love in the world.

2. Daughters inevitably become their mothers.

So when the mother/daughter relationship is broken or poisoned, the daughter is left with a very specific kind of existential confusion. Namely:

1. If mothers naturally love their daughters most, why didn’t mine?

2. If I’m supposed to become her, what does that make me?

That makes betrayal from the mother can feel like something closer to a collapse of identity, not just a family conflict. What makes the often motherless gentle son archetype is interesting because he gets a different emotional arrangement. His mother is gone, and thus idealized. He can love her safely, and the betrayal element disappears, which makes grief replaces rage. All this creates space for something the angry daughter may not feel allowed to do directly, which is to grieve the mother she wanted.

A daughter’s rage at her mother can feel like a threat to identity itself. The motherless gentle son archetype lets that grief exist in a purified form. He can mourn his mother without having to wrestle with rivalry, betrayal, or becoming her. Female anger, especially toward mothers, tends to be framed as a combination of ingratitude, insensitivity, and even a betrayal of femininity. So the angry daughter experiences two punishments, the original injury by her mother and the shame of feeling rage about it.

Meanwhile the gentle son hero gets to experience inherited pain and moral outrage without being shamed for it. His anger is framed as heroic moral clarity, not deviance.

While I was babysitting that night, I was simultaneously experiencing the night in two ways: as the caretaker, and as a daughter thinking about mothers. I found myself circling this question of what it means to inherit womanhood. I couldn’t settle on a satisfying answer.

Later that night after the girls were asleep and I was scrolling Instagram, I found a reel by a woman discussing the day she realized her mother was an abusive narcissist. Some of the comments were supportive, but many were trying to justify the mother to her. Some told her she wouldn’t understand how difficult it was to be a mother until she had kids herself, some suggested that she needed more compassion as her mother likely had an undiagnosed mental illness, and some have said her mother seemed sweet and she seemed ungrateful. The whole experience was a reminder of why being the angry daughter is such a frustrating place to be: no one wants their mother to be the villain, and our society has no problem saying that a daughter turning on her mother is a failing of the daughter. There’s a pretense that the daughter is flattening the mother and not recognizing her complexities, but in reality the world is flattening her into some tragic victim, making the daughter antagonist to her suffering.

Being an angry daughter is difficult. The gentle son is appealing because he gets the pain, the transformation.

The angry daughter and the gentle son occupy opposite edges of the same cultural boundary. Society expects boys to be strong, aggressive, and dominant, while girls are expected to be nurturing, accommodating, and relational. But the gentle son rejects dominant masculinity while the angry daughter rejects compliant femininity. Because of this, both become misfits of their gender systems, in opposite directions. Both occupy the same emotional territory of a moral sensitivity inside of a system that expects them to be wholly something else.

I used to identify strongly as a writer. And by ‘used to’ I mean as recently as two weeks ago. That stretch was going for about a month, and before that I had a solid two, maybe three years of identifying as a writer. And then in high school, that was my identity.

Basically, I identify as a writer anytime I have a story that I am writing. A fictional story. During fiction writing, I get so many ideas, and I feel like words pour out of me, and I think that every thought I have is worth writing down. But then I go through these transitions where I stop thinking about writing, stop having anything to write, and that’s because everything else is becoming…

For a while I thought that I had simply become too busy to write, during those stretches of writer’s block. I used to attribute those stretches of writers block with college and then with starting a job as a teacher. Then I looked at them more closely and noticed that they tended to align with some traumatic life event that I don’t feel like going into details here. But what I will say is this: It’s really strange to feel the world slipping away from you. It’s also weird to wonder if you are grieving, or if grieving is a convenient excuse.

I’ve noticed there’s a type of story I write when I genuinely want to write, and a type of story I try to write when I want to be a writer. Occasionally I try to write the latter, and sometimes even make progress with it. But I know it’s not the writing I want to be doing because sitting down to write for it feels like clocking into a job that I hate. I spent 2020-2023 perfecting a fictional duology series. The most recent projects I got into were horror fanfictions (surprisingly I’m not embarrassed to admit this) and it reminded me of what it feels like for writing to be your oxygen.

I like writing about childhood under threat, where childhood is precarious, invaded or else weaponized. I like writing about captivity and psychological control, where horror is not only external but relational. I like writing about survival and escape, and the aftermath of trauma. I like exploring the question of how someone grows from a history of trauma, and who a person really was when their childhood was stolen. I like writing about identity formed under distortion, and power imbalances, and corrupted mentorship and stolen innocence. I think I like writing about survival as transformation. Also, I have a tendency to write downer endings.

I don’t like writing directly about myself, my childhood, my teenage years, directly about my mother, my family, my family history, or directly about what it’s like to be a woman who doesn’t quite know what she’s doing with her life.

I’ve been liking my life a lot more since I moved to Colorado. I go on adventures, I see my friends daily, I took up dancing, and I still play piano. The writing part though, it can be hard to fit into what I’m doing. I tried being a teacher and I taught middle school English for two years at a small school with a big community. I loved the kids there but I learned I can’t teach and feel light in my body and clear in my mind.

Now I’m back to not identifying as a teacher (sure, I tutor and I teach beginners piano, but it doesn’t feel the same.) I sometimes try to look at my current life (freelancing and nannying and tutoring the arts) as chic and elegant, but then I start wondering how much of a nightmare taxes are going to be, and what even is my retirement fund. Planning that far ahead seems incomprehensible.

The other identity I saw (see?) myself growing into was (is?) being a mother. Since I was old enough to play with dolls, I wanted to be a mother. It’s got something to do with wanting to nurture, wanting to protect, wanting to have someone that is my responsibility.

Recently one of my middle school students from last year died, less than a year after being diagnosed with cancer. It was the first funeral I went to for a child. There was a repeated refrain that they were in a better place but no one took comfort in that. At the grave everyone was quiet and somber. One student started crying and once they did, they couldn’t stop. I held them, feeling inwardly and urgently that it was absolutely necessary, my only purpose, to stay there and hold them.

When I write about childhood under threat, and about corrupted innocence, I always use external threats. I never write about cancer and other illnesses that creep inside and steal you from within.

I went to the school again for a few events afterwards, wanting to be some type of support. When I was there the kids asked me to be their English teacher again. It was both warming to hear and complicating: I’ve basically put behind me the idea that I’ll ever be a school teacher again, but in so many ways that is what I want. When I lost writing, I told myself it was fine because my identity was a teacher.

I guess this is all bringing me to a question I’ve been struggling with:

If my identity only feels real when I’m producing something (a novel, a classroom, a stable career), then who am I in the in-between?

The last few years have been rough, and I’ve been trapped in the worst writer’s block I’ve ever experienced. I only managed to break through twice: once for a piece on Superman (still unpublished because it quickly became about my mom’s death last year, and I wasn’t ready to share that), and once for The Black Phone 2 (which is published because I had passion).

I need to send Joe Hill a thank-you note. Since reading 20th Century Ghosts in 2020, his work has stuck with me. My first ambitious braided essay was about “The Black Phone” (my first substack article!) One of my strongest MFA annotations was about his work. And recently (spoiler alert, this is the point of this post) my writer’s block finally broke. I’ve started writing a reimagining of The Black Phone sequel based on the premise he gave the film writers: “the phone rings, Finney answers, and it’s The Grabber calling from Hell.”

I forgot how amazing it feels to be pulled into writing again.

I’m excited to have something to return to, even if it never goes anywhere. I’m hoping this will help me rebuild the habit of posting short-form here. I want my MFA to be more than a dust collector on a shelf. Most of all, I want to writing to be a part of me I can’t live without.

I didn’t have hopes initially. I saw promos for The Black Phone 2 and was immediately nonplussed. Why were they trying to continue the story? They’d already stretched the source material (a short story) into a 103 minute long movie, and the story ended with the antagonist, a human, dead. Why come back to it? 

I had immediately worried that the movie would mostly center around the younger sister (the weakest thread in the original, in my opinion). More than that, I worried that the movie would try to over explain the grabber’s backstory, because there’s not much else to do when the story’s over.

Then I saw that it had good reviews on rotten tomatoes, and I let myself hope.

I am Boo Boo the Fool. 

The rest of this will be in an Internet- friendly numbered list.

Things I liked

1. Finney. 

 I mean, are we surprised that Finney is number one? From the first movie, he grabbed my heart. He’s clever, he’s resilient, and he’s also young and vulnerable and audiences are on the edge of their seat watching to see if he can protect himself against The Grabber. In the sequel, we meet Finney years later, still haunted by both the phone calls and the trauma of survival. The movie almost touches something great here: Finney’s isolation, his volatility, his need to prove he’s still that kid who took down a killer. He picks fights at school, smokes pot, and drifts through his days with no real connection to anyone (and denying his connection to the supernatural- see note 3). There’s something quietly tragic in that. 

(Unspoken, though begging to be explored in a better script: his only friend, Robin, also endured the Grabber’s basement, and died there. The last time Finney was able to speak to Robin was in the basement, when Robin was a dead voice over the phone, and Robin was the one who gave him the final thing he needed to take the Grabber down. That kind of survivor’s guilt and grief would shape everything about Finney’s psyche. Imagine if the film had leaned into that.)

2. The first phone call between Finney and the Grabber (for about 30 seconds of it)

Spoilers ahead, but let’s be honest: The Black Phone 2 completely fumbles the Finney–Grabber dynamic. Still, the first phone call starts with promise.

What made their relationship fascinating in the first movie was its asymmetry. Finney’s fear was palpable, but the Grabber’s emotions were harder to gauge, a combination of pitiful and obsessive, and always predatory. There were implications of pedophilia (“I just want to look at you”), moments of bizarre tenderness, and seemingly sincere disappointment when Finney lied about his name. The Grabber’s promise, “I won’t make you do anything you won’t like”,  was delusional and revealing.

So when they speak again in The Black Phone 2, those first few beats echo that discomfort. The Grabber revels in his return, intoxicated by power. Finney, panicked but defiant, tries to disguise fear with anger, insisting the calls aren’t real. For a moment, it works, like the only good scene in Child’s Play 3 when Andy and Chucky meet again. Both stories hinge on that haunting idea: the monster from your childhood has found you again, unchanged, while you’ve spent years trying to recover.

The Grabber wants to hurt Finney from beyond. He’s always wanted to hurt Finney. Even death hasn’t changed that and if anything, it’s sharpened his resolve. He never got to “win” their game of Naughty Boy, and in his mind, that unfinished domination still overwhelms him.

And then…it gets bad. But we’re on the Things I Liked portion for now, so let me move on. 

3. “Sorry I can’t help you”

Out of service phones ring, and there are ghosts on the other end. In the first movie, each ghost is able to vaguely communicate and help Finney ultimately escape. In the second movie, we see that Finney can still hear phones ringing. 

When the film was still promising to be a good movie, there is a moment where Finney picks one up, listens for a beat, and says flatly, “Sorry, I can’t help you,” before walking away.

It’s a perfect line. In just five words, we see how broken he is. Remember how I said earlier that Finney has no real connections in this movie? He’s also rejecting the one kind of connection that once saved him.

4. Ghost characters being visible to the audience during conversation, but not the characters they’re speaking to

This visual device of ghosts appearing to us but not to the living characters was carried over from the first movie, and I still love it. It gives every ghostly exchange a mournful edge, like these lost souls are trapped in an echo, desperate to reach out but barely brushing the living world. I’ve always liked portrayals of the afterlife that feel shadowed, lonely, and fading. It reminds me of death in Ancient Greek myths. It’s great.

5. The aggressive 80s slang made me giggle 

This movie takes place in the 80s and really wanted to let you know that with some of the slang used. The entire exchange about the Duran Duran concert has been living in my head. 

6. The way dream sequences are filmed

Gwen’s dream sequences are filmed to look like old grainy, fuzzy videotapes, which feels like memories that don’t want to be remembered. The effect is unsettling and nostalgic, and it works. It reminded me of Skinamarink, which is maybe the nicest thing I can say: I liked this movie most when it reminded me of better movies.

Things I Hated

1. The Psychic Child Trope (Done Badly)

I know that this story traces back to Stephen King’s lineage, so the psychic child trope is basically hereditary. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

Let me engage with it seriously for a moment. I usually dislike “psychic kid” stories because they often exist to move the plot along through convenient visions as a built-in deus ex machina. The trope can work, though. Example: Danny Torrance: his “shine” fits The Shining’s themes perfectly. He sees things others refuse to see, and his ability to see truth mirrors the way children often recognize family dysfunction before adults do. Jack and Wendy’s obsession with protecting Danny’s “innocence” borders on delusional. Jack literally broke his son’s arm before the story even begins. Danny’s psychic sensitivity is itself an external expression of trauma awareness: he knows, even when everyone insists he doesn’t.

Then there’s Gwen, the deus ex machina queen.

Her visions are not thematically earned, they’re like shortcuts. Worse than that, she’s always been disconnected from the emotional center of the story. The focus on her psychic dreams pulls momentum away from Finney, the actual protagonist of the first movie, and redirects it toward a subplot that is just hollow. Which brings me to my next grievance.

2. Finney (Yes, Really)

I love Finney, but this movie hates him. 

He’s sidelined so brutally it makes you rethink how the whole series has treated him.

 Let’s rewind to the first movie. 

There’s that infamous scene where Finney and Gwen’s father beats Gwen with a belt, forcing her to recite that her dreams are “just dreams.” It’s a horrifying, well-acted moment, but also a gratuitous one. Reportedly, there was internal debate about whether to cut it for being too upsetting, but it stayed.

Here’s my question: if that scene had to stay, why wasn’t Finney the one being beaten?

In the first film, the Grabber already functions as a metaphor for abusive parents. His “games” mirror cycles of control and punishment:  he literally plans to beat the boys with a belt. There’s a clear symbolic link between domestic violence and the Grabber’s sadism, but the movie never leans into it through Finney’s experience. Giving that scene to Gwen instead weakens the metaphor and distances Finney from the emotional core of his own story.

And in the second movie, it only gets worse. Finney isn’t allowed to do anything. The script tries to excuse this by saying he’s “in denial,” but that’s just lazy writing. The Grabber supposedly targets Gwen to hurt Finney because “she’s the one he loves most in the world.” But then the movie forgets that logic entirely; suddenly, the Grabber seems to have forgotten Finney even exists. The plot turns to Gwen’s psychic visions and their mother’s backstory, leaving Finney behind.

He gets one big moment to articulate his trauma in a scene that could have been cathartic if it weren’t buried in clunky dialogue and resolved with whiplash speed.

It’s genuinely so frustrating to watch a character once defined by his resilience be reduced to a nothing in his own story.

3. The grabber is back as  Freddy Krueger knock off I guess

Don’t try to tell me that scene of him spinning Gwen like a top wasn’t lifted straight out of Nightmare on Elm Street 4.

This is the point where I usually become unintelligible with rage, but I’ll try to stay narratively cohesive (which is more than this movie managed.)

The Grabber has gone through several transformations: from Joe Hill’s short story to the first film, and now to this unnecessary sequel. In the original story, he’s referred to simply as Al: unsettling, but not particularly terrifying. He’s dangerous mainly because he already has the upper hand, since Finney’s locked in his basement and physically weakened. Hill’s original version of the character is honestly buffoonish, and Finney seems to hold the emotional advantage.

In the film, though, Ethan Hawke turns the Grabber into something else entirely. Tall, looming, his face hidden behind a rotating series of masks, the living embodiment of instability. Hawke’s performance makes him frightening not because he’s loud or monstrous, but because he’s unpredictable: childish one moment, seething with rage the next.

The changing masks feel like a metaphor for life with an emotionally unpredictable abuser. They’re never the same face twice, and you never know which one you’ll get.

One of the most interesting differences between the short story and the first film is in a tiny piece of dialogue. In the story, when Finney warns, “If you try to touch me, I’ll scratch your face,” Al processes this and says nothing.   In the movie, the Grabber points to his mask and calmly asks, “This face?”

It’s chilling. That small addition shifts the dynamic entirely. Finney doesn’t have the upper hand anymore; the Grabber controls both the tone and the meaning of the exchange. It’s also a moment that stays with Finney long after the basement, haunting him again in the sequel when he hallucinates the Grabber repeating that same line in his backyard.

The Grabber barely appears in the first film, but every scene he’s in is unforgettable, a classic Beetlejuice effect. He’s memorable because of his absence. He’s human, but not quite. That ambiguity is what made him terrifying.

This is exactly why I dreaded The Black Phone 2 from the moment I heard it was happening. Making the Grabber supernatural felt like the worst possible choice. The power of the first story was how ordinary evil could be.

But instead of answering the few intriguing questions that might have deepened his character—

• How could he afford two houses? (Actually, let’s just drop that one. It’s dumb.)

• How did he view parental or authority figures, especially given what little we see of his brother?

• Was his dual personality genuine dissociation, or just another layer of manipulation?

the sequel goes full dream demon. Suddenly, the Grabber isn’t just calling from beyond; he’s invading Gwen’s dreams, inflicting physical harm from another dimension, and apparently rewriting the laws of death.

It’s as if the filmmakers wanted to make  A Nightmare on Elm Street but couldn’t get the rights to Freddy Krueger. 

Visually, it’s pretty cool. I’d even like it in a different movie. But in this movie it served to bastardize whatever interesting ideas they had going for them. 

4. “ the Joker killed Batman’s parents”

It’s the Joker killed Batman’s parents all over again. Writers think they have to tie everything together in a neat, tragic circle, even if it completely guts the story’s logic. The sequel decides that the Grabber killed Gwen and Finney’s mom years before the first film, which is both ridiculous and insulting. The first movie’s explanation was that she took her own life because her psychic visions became unbearable. This retcon turns that uncomfortable truth into a cheap murder-mystery twist that doesn’t even make sense. How did the Grabber know where she lived? Why would he stage a suicide instead of burying her like all his other victims? Does he even realize Finney is her son? 

           It’s not a tragic irony. It’s just stupid, so stupid I feel I can’t even sincerely engage with this writing, because the writing itself is not sincerely engaging with itself. 

Last list: My suggestions

The better version of The Black Phone 2 would’ve just leaned into being a Silence of the Lambs knockoff. Hear me out.

You may have noticed that I haven’t actually described the plot yet, and that’s because it’s really, really stupid. But fine, here it is: Gwen starts having psychic visions of boys murdered back in the 1950s. They seem to be trapped in a lake, and she pieces together that they were killed at some kind of “winter camp” (which, sidenote, I have literally never heard of, but sure. I don’t know everything). She goes there with Finney and a new character who’s apparently Robin’s younger brother, though the movie barely remembers that detail exists.

Now, here’s what I thought was going to happen/ why I briefly had hope.

I thought Gwen’s visions and this new mystery were going to introduce a completely new story with a new antagonist. I thought the Grabber’s role would be limited to the phone,  and he’d become a Hannibal Lecter type, offering clues and psychological manipulation from beyond the grave. He’d help Finney solve an unrelated case, but in doing so, he’d try to destroy him emotionally. That setup could’ve been great: the Grabber as a ghostly puppeteer, aware of things beyond his own crimes, taunting Finney with memories and visions.

In fact, when the scene began that reveals the Grabber killed their mother, I genuinely thought we were about to see the mother kill herself. That gave me the idea of what if the Grabber showed Finney the moment of his mother’s suicide to torment him? That would’ve been twisted and horrifying in the right way: a supernatural metaphor for grief, trauma, and how PTSD can trap you in your own past.

But no. Instead, we learn that the Grabber also killed three boys in the 1950s when he worked at this camp (which, again, when did this man have time for multiple houses and a full career at a children’s camp?). And somehow, Gwen (not Finney, whose entire psyche the Grabber shredded in the first movie) gets to be the main character in this dynamic.

The Black Phone 2 isn’t just a bad sequel.  I could forgive it if that’s all it was. But really, it’s a symptom of modern horror’s identity crisis. Hollywood can’t stand to let anything actually end. Every self-contained story has to be dragged out and called a franchise. The Grabber was never supposed to be a “horror icon.” That was literally the point: he was terrifying because he was human. Turning him into a dream-demon knockoff doesn’t make him the next Freddy Krueger,  it just proves the filmmakers didn’t understand what made him scary in the first place.

And that’s really the state of horror right now. The only new “icons” in recent memory are M3GAN and Art the Clown and they  earned their status through a mix of meme-able camp and shock value. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it says a lot that our modern pantheon is split between irony and extremity. The Grabber doesn’t fit either category, and making him supernatural is like adding Jason Voorhees to Silence of the Lambs. It’s stupid. 

The Black Phone 2 is proof that Hollywood Horror doesn’t know how to tell stories anymore. It’s all franchise and expansion. 

(PS: Joe Hill I really enjoy your writing, please don’t get mad at me for this review.) 

(PPS: how come nobody has the same name as their character from the short story? In the story Finney’s name is John Finney, his sister is Susanna, and the Grabber is Al. Here we have Finney (first name), Gwen, and Bill. This isn’t necessarily a complaint I’m just genuinely confused why this was changed) 

(PPPS: seriously are winter camps a thing?)

Set in Michigan in the 1970s, Jeffrey Eugenides’ 1993 debut novel The Virgin Suicides follows the lives and eventual suicides of the five Lisbon sisters, ranging from thirteen to seventeen years old. Written in the first person plural, it’s told entirely from the perspective of anonymous teen boys who were feverishly infatuated with the mysterious girls, all described as “short, roundbuttocked in denim, with roundish cheeks that recalled that same dorsal softness.” Their parents are described as plain and protective, the latter trait becoming suffocatingly overbearing after their fourteen year old daughter spends a night out with a boy. The parents essentially lock their house down, not allowing the girls out. All the daughters kill themselves and their parents divorce and sell their home. The boys manage to gather the family photo-albums from the trash, along with other memorabilia of the girls lives. Twenty years later, they still reflect and lament the girls suicides as selfish acts that they’d never fully recover from. They loved the girls but had never truly known them, and the motive for their suicides would always be a mystery. The girls themselves are a mystery simply because they are girls, and the boys view being a girl as a form of “imprisonment… the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together.”

Six years after publication, Sofia Coppola wrote and directed what would become the cult classic film adaptation.

Coppola’s vision of the story is dreamy and sugary pink, filled with melodies and stardust, closed eyes and lullabies. The description of Cecilia’s suicide in the opening chapter was nauseating, “afloat in her pink pool, with the yellow eyes of someone possessed and her small body giving off the odor of a mature woman….blood on the bathmat, Mr. Lisbon’s razor sunk in the toilet bowl, marbling the water”- all the details making the scene smelly and muggy and bloody. In the movie, the shot of Cecelia floating in the tub is tranquil, still and lovely. In the book, Cecilia’s attempt was allegedly discovered by a neighborhood boy who would regularly sneak into the house to spy on the girls. This detail isn’t explored in the film; in fact, much of the unnerving voyeurism in the book is absent in the film. It’s like Coppola is reclaiming the perspective, or else turning the audience into the voyeurs. The more provocative visual details are things like bras hanging off of crucifixes. In the books, the boys did things like steal the girls lipstick so they could try it on and kiss each other to imagine kissing the girls. The world of the book is a gothic mundanity but the movie feels dreamier, softer, intoxicatingly ethereal. Coppola invented a world filled with sorrow that invites viewers in nonetheless.

Coppola’s movie omits and changes plenty of Eugenides’ world. The psychology of the book is also more complicated, often refusing to let readers conclude with a simple answer for any character’s motivation. There’s a point in the book and the film where, after Cecilia died, the older sisters protest the removal of an infected tree in their yard. Initially in the book- and definitively in the movie- it seems like the girls are trying to protect the tree that their dead youngest sister loved so much. But in the book, this is undercut when their father recalls, in retrospect, “Actually it was Bonnie who cared so much.” Was this the father misremembering or was he right? The book has a constant desire to untangle the girl’s motivations, a desire that’s repeatedly denied by the complicated and persuasively irregular nature of people. The girls never get to speak for themselves either, though Coppola does her best to show the girls side anyway. Fourteen year old Lux is a highly sexual character who flirts, kisses, and eventually starts having sex with boys on her roof after her parents go to bed for the night and in the book, her promiscuity is treated directly as a self-destructive tendency. The boys even ask a therapist about her, who remarks that “Lux’s promiscuity was a commonplace reaction to emotional need: ‘Adolescents tend to seek love where they can find it…Lux confused the sexual act with love. For her, sex became a substitute for the comfort she needed as a result of her sister’s suicide.’” This explicit analysis is left out in the film. Lux’s sadness is only seen visually, through dissatisfied expressions and many cigarettes.

The Virgin Suicides is a strange story, in part because of its narrative structure and in part because of the tension between its content and what the story it aims to tell. There’s a mundane slowness to the tone and a haze that makes the story feel mythic. It’s about depressed teenage girls who all kill themselves but the girls aren’t important in their context, only in their impressions. The girls try again and again to get help- or so it seems- but no one sees or hears them truly. “We decided that the girls had been trying to talk to us all along,” the boys admit, “to elicit our help, but we’d been too infatuated to listen.”

But more than being about the girls, the story is about the futility to make sense of other people. In the final pages the boys reflect how all that mattered to them was that they had loved the Lisob sisters “and that they hadn’t heard us calling, still do not hear us… calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.”

The girls died but the boys spent the rest of their lives, well into adulthood, haunted by the very question of them. They spend decades in a fruitless task of trying to make sense of the past, even though there is nothing that could be said that would ever be satisfying enough; there is no memory that is clear and objective. There is no easy or convenient answer that one can definitely know to be true. Sometimes there isn’t a real truth to a person’s misery, or a real truth to an fundamental unfairness in the world; it just is.

Mysterious Skin

Set in Kansas in the 1980s, Scott Heim’s 1995 novel Mysterious Skin follows two boys, Neil McCormick and Brian Lackey. In the summer of 1981, the then eight-year-old boys were sexually abused by their baseball coach. Brian, so traumatized, blocked the entire memory from his mind and convinced himself that he’d been abducted by aliens. Neil is fully aware of the events and convinced that the abuse was true love. As teens, Neil becomes a thrill-seeker and a prostitute, whereas Brian is cautious and anxious and deluded into believing in his supposed alien abduction. When Brian sees a photo of his little league team and recognizes young Neil from his abduction, he tracks down Neil for answers. They break into the house where their coach used to live, where Neil finally tells Brian the truth of how their coach abused them.

Mysterious Skin has something of a mystery to it- what did happen in those five hours that Brian can’t remember?- but the revelation that Coach sexually abused him isn’t a plot twist. The details of his assault and Neil’s presence during it are the only mystery. There isn’t any surprise that Coach is a villain either; the second chapter- around ten minutes into the film- is when he rapes eight-year-old Neil for the first time. Coach also exits the story by the second chapter, his disappearance a vague mystery to Neil and Brian, but with an ultimately mundane explanation that he moved away. Neither the book nor the movie are concerned with plot so much as psychology, the lasting effect of trauma on adolescents. Both boys have highly typical and opposite responses to their abuse. Brian blacked out the memory and denies that the abuse happened, or that sex even exists. While he develops a crush on a girl as a teen, he panics when she tries to kiss him and another character remarks that Brian seems fully asexual. But Neil sexualizes everything. As a tween he took pleasure in hypnotizing classmates so he could grind up against them. When he’s a teenager, he turns to prostitution, mostly for money and partially because he’s luxuriating in the power he believes his youth has over men. Brian blocked out the memory as a way of protecting himself but Neil chose to rationalize it and rewrite it as a new reality that he could feel good about.

Neil is a mystery to everyone around him and a bit of a mystery to himself but he’s the one who knows all the answers. He’s described as beautiful and carefree, but also violent and at times sociopathic. When Neil was in fifth grade, he convinced a friend to help him ‘kidnap’ a special needs classmate on Halloween and lit fireworks from the boy’s mouth. Afterwards, when “his mouth was bleeding…little red splinters stuck through (his) lips, jammed there from the wooden rocket sticks… bubbles of blood dotted the lips”(Heim 71), Neil then performs oral sex on the boy (a handjob in the movie, probably because that would be easier to film in a way that Neil’s child actor wouldn’t know what he was doing) and says that he’s doing this to make the boy like him enough not to tell on him; “that feels nice, right?”(Heim 72) Neil asks, almost echoing what Coach said to him after the first assault, “You liked it…it’s okay that you liked it,” (Heim 37.)

Mysterious Skin is powerful and immensely difficult to stomach and this isn’t just because it depicts pedophilia and childhood sexual abuse. The story refuses to idealize childhood and the children aren’t angelically innocent; they’re human. Viewers can’t help but be definitively on Brian’s side- how can they not, especially when he’s a tiny boy who can’t be responsible for himself?- yet Neil can be shockingly cruel and mean spirited, even when he’s just a little boy. The contexts of the boy’s lives also exemplifies why it was so easy for Neil to be groomed and manipulated where Brian wasn’t; Neil was raised by an irresponsible single mother and was eager for someone to treat him like the whole world. Neil would be so willing to make everything his idealized coach did okay that he could believe any story Coach spun for him, even the idea that the sex was something he wanted and initiated himself. Adding to Neil’s turmoil is the fact that he is gay and was bullied and ostracized for his sexuality since he was just ten. Being so rejected by everyone else could explain why he so defiantly insisted that his coach loved him and that what had happened was okay.

The story also refuses to idealize Brian’s innocence by showing that he never really had a home and family that unconditionally loved him. He seemed to come from a loving home but his father was cruelly oblivious and alternated between ignoring and punishing Brian’s symptoms of PTSD. It’s true, no one including Brian knew that he’d been sexually abused, but Brian does confront the fact that his father should’ve cared enough to notice; “I was bleeding, and I was dirty, and I smelled horrible, half-dead… all the times I passed out after that, all the times I pissed the bed, with you never questioning why, only screaming at me for it?”(Heim 218.)

The film, directed by Gregg Araki, doesn’t change the content so much as it omits some details. It also manages to take the viewer further out of the characters head in a way that both complicates their perspective and simplifies the drama. Mysterious Skin is narrated in alternating first person perspectives, so when the viewer is taken away from the otherwise dominating I-perspective, they can see what feels like a more objective reality. For instance, there’s a point where Neil is brutally beaten and raped by a client. He passes out during the attack and wakes up on the lawn in front of the man’s apartment with no memory of how he got there. In the book, he gets up and begins stumbling home; “I lumbered and tripped like a hopeless drunk, like the person my mom had been when she’d barely survived her worst drinking days. ‘Mom,’ I said aloud. I almost put ‘I want my’ in front of it”(Heim 248.)

In the movie, he doesn’t stand up right away. Instead, he lifts his bloodied head up and says, “Mom.”

The book has a subtle added complexity and the film has a powerful simplification. Book Neil doesn’t seem to really want his mother, not the person she is, the woman waiting in Kansas, but he still calls for Mom. For the movie, his inner turmoil and his contradicting wants and needs aren’t relevant that present moment; after being beaten and raped, the first word he says is, “Mom.” Neil had been able to get in cars with random Johns and get plenty of money for it since he was a very young boy with alarming impunity. Now that something has happened to him, it feels like the deepest cry for help.

Neil and Brian were horrifically abused as children and built up their own walls of denial as a way of coping. By the end, when Neil explains Brian exactly what had happened to both of them that summer, Brian outwardly breaks down at the realization of his abuse and Neil breaks down at the realization that he was abused. In the final lines of the book and film, Neil thinks how “I wanted to tell (Brian)...that everything would be fine, but I couldn’t,” (Heim 291.) In the movie, he adds, “I wished with all my heart that we could just leave this world behind.” The darkness of the night is closing in on them and there’s a sense of futility as they attempt to find comfort within each other and importantly, they have to continue living.

Two Teenage Trauma Tales

Mysterious Skin and The Virgin Suicide feel like sibling books; they’re both their authors debut books, published in the 1990s and set in Middle America small towns. They were both adapted into critically acclaimed films by acclaimed directors. Both films have incredible soundtracks. Both stories deal with themes of adolescent angst, depression, and trauma. Both have wildly sexual teen characters who act out as a rebellion for what they have gone through. But while The Virgin Suicides has maintain its popularity through the years, Mysterious Skin has faded into some obscurity. This could be because Mysterious Skin was adapted by an indie-film, without the power or acclaim that a Coppola director has. A better reason could be because Mysterious Skin was slapped with the dreaded NC-17 rating (The Virgin Suicides is rated R), and when that rating is paired with the knowledge that the film will be about childhood sexual abuse, many audiences could be fully turned off.

The Virgin Suicides is also probably more popular because it’s intoxicatingly digestible. It turns adolescence into a tragic fairy-tale, with an aurora of mystery that is never satisfyingly concluded. But Mysterious Skin is a compellingly honest story. It hits an uncomfortably raw note, probably because the perspective of the story is so directly aligned with Neil and Brian. The Virgin Suicides isn’t trying to be an honest depiction of the teenage girls, but an honest depiction of an obsession; the boys project an adolescent fairy-tale onto the girls that only disappears when the girls unapologetic fullness and plenitude and strangeness is too great to ignore. “From our viewpoint, the Lisbons’ sadness was beyond our comprehension” they admit. The core of The Virgin Suicides is trying to understand something that is fundamentally unanswerable, abstracting and mythologizing what it means to be a teenage girl because the girls are so unknowable to the narrators, and perhaps unknowable to themselves.

But this isn’t altogether honest because being unknowable isn’t unique to being a girl; most people are a mystery to themselves, especially teenagers who are just coming into their own consciousness and their awareness of the world and their place within it. Writing self-awareness in fiction is quite challenging because most people aren’t self-aware. This is evident in both stories, how Brian insists that he was abducted by aliens, and Neil insists that his coach loved him, and how the neighborhood boys insist that they are in love with the Lisbon sisters in the purest sense. Mysterious Skin is forced to eventually confront their denial but the neighborhood boys never have to; they’re distant enough from the girls that they can continue living on with their puzzle of Cecilia, Lux, Bonnie, Mary, and Therese’s lives and deaths.

The Virgin Suicides is a haunting fantasy that illuminates the feeling and even desire of being unknowable. Mysterious Skin is harrowing and strangely hopeful, and one of the most touching and honest depictions of the very real and true horrors of child abuse. It’s a shame that Mysterious Skin is a forgotten sibling because the stories compliment each other so well; one is about turning suffering into a fantasy and the other is about what happens as that fantasy breaks.

How am I supposed to keep busy without stories to entertain myself? This is why I don’t choose to identify as a writer, even though most of my peers would. I don’t write necessarily, I just like coming up with things. I’d love it if I had an audience but my primary audience is myself. 

I was discussing this with a friend recently, this being about identifying as a writer. He identify himself as a writer and was surprised to hear that most people in my life don’t even know that I like writing, let alone that I’m in an MFA program with two fully written (albeit unpublished) books under my belt. Trying to explaining my reasoning was difficult because nothing I said seemed to satisfy. “I don’t like getting asked, ‘so what do you write?’”

You don’t like telling people about yourself?

“I always get asked where I’m published, and I don’t have anything to show for it.”

So you need to be published to call yourself a writer?

That type of discourse- validity in craft discourse- is exhausting and is one thing I wouldn’t miss if twitter dies. Lots of people emphasize that you’re a writer if you write, plain and simple, and saying that you need to be published is gatekeeping at best. It makes it seem like the importance of publication is ego, not necessity. It’s impossible to advance in your career in any stage- being a writing teacher, being a journalist, being a novelist, etc- without a publication history, plain and simple. An MFA is a terminal degree, which means one can teach college with it, but no college would hire anyone who’s unpublished and unknown.  

These advancements require a type of popularity that’s outside of my grasp. I’ve never been popular, on or offline. Performance of any kind is too difficult for me. Growing up I loved playing piano, but I hated recitals. My hands would get clammy, my stomach would tighten, my fingers would tense at the worst possible moment. Because of all that I was never all that good, and my performances were rushed and sloppy. That’s why I much preferred writing, at least on a first glance. No performance was necessary, I just had to write and write whatever I wanted until I could spur a reality that made sense. Piano helped me express an emotion but writing helped me express a thought. That’s why I get frustrated when I get writer's block; I feel like I can’t make sense of anything.

I didn’t have time to listen to the song, so I google’d the lyrics instead. 

Do you ever get a little bit tired of life

Like you're not really happy but you don't wanna die

Like you're hanging by a thread but you gotta survive

'Cause you gotta survive

Thanks? I texted back with the crying face emoji.

           She replied: Happy tears?

Love that my mental instability is that remarkable to you, I texted with the laughing emoji, the crying emoji and the heart emoji. Then the conversation dropped. 

The message didn’t come that out of the blue: she had just visited and I wound up telling her how I felt so lonely and lost and overwhelmed by the sheer amount of nothing in my life. I told her that I felt so much pressure from everyone while still feeling so alone. I guess the pressure was really coming from myself, but I didn’t know that at the time. I told her that I was tired, because I was always putting in so much work and effort in writing and never being met with any recognition. It’s despairing: everything feels so futile. 

My friends are getting married, having babies, moving, starting new careers. I’m desperately searching for my own sense of purpose, which I guess we all are but I feel uniquely pressured. I’ve got nothing else. 

Teaching is the only job that ever made sense to me, and I briefly got it in my head that I should start some sort of Sparknotes. I told a few friends; just about everyone told me that was a dumb idea: the ‘study guide’ market is oversaturated and I wouldn’t really have much to offer. The most encouraging message I got was that’s not really a bad idea, but you’ll probably tell your readers that they’re all secretly about trauma.

I responded to that with my own joke, which was actually just self-deprecation: Bold of you to assume that I could actually build and maintain any sort of readership. After all, I can’t make anyone pay attention to me for very long, no matter what I do.

But secretly, when they texted me that, I was shocked by how badly I suddenly wanted to cry. I was so frazzled and so desperate for some purpose, but suddenly I just felt so stupid. Is that all I’m known for? Misunderstood, immature readings of ‘trauma’? Self-indulgent close reads, projections that I pretend are originality? Is that all I am to people, a silly wound dweller?

I felt so stupid, which is how I usually feel after a bout of euphoric excitement. The  difference is that usually I feel stupid all on my own. I don’t engage with people very often, so it’s rare for that stupidity to be inspired by someone else’s words, someone else’s perception. 

But lately I’m realizing what a catastrophic mess people perceive me as: a weepy, screaming child with low intelligence and strange interests. Or maybe not strange, but overcompensated. Once I admitted to a friend that I actually hate when I get too excited about books, movies, or anything of the like. “It just feels so shaky,” I tried to explain, “like, I feel almost cold? And then I lose it and I just feel so stupid and empty.”

I remember walking out of The Batman practically rattled with excitement. The next day I even made a Youtube video talking about how much I loved that movie. Then, so suddenly, I just felt so lonely. 

 Maybe it’s self-awareness that does me in. I was so excited and then suddenly I can see what it must look like to someone else; that no one shares the excitement. My enthusiasm turns me into a spectacle that many want to naturally ridicule. Or maybe not ridicule. Something else.  

Sometimes I hesitate to admit these feelings of loneliness because it just feels so pathetic. Why can’t I see that I’m the only consistency in my life? Why can’t I realize that the problem is with me, which means that the change lies within me? Why am I so scared of what other people think, when I’m an adult of twenty-four? 

But really, what difference does admitting this make? It’s not like anybody reads this.

Eventually he finds the girl who likes it, a young teenage girl. He’s disappointed, but then they sit together and bond over the book. “I love the way Holden rebels against the hypocrisies of middle class values,” he says proudly as the young girl shakes her head.

“Excuse me, but that’s so not the point,” she says. “The book is about the search for a sense of self.”

Embarrassed, he says, “Right…I knew that…”

  The ending is cute, but I actually thought both characters were correct in their analysis: Holden is lost and struggling to understand himself, and he does rebel against societal values, or at least resent them. He also does point out the hypocrisies of middle class values, particularly at the way it celebrates and even protects violence among young, upper-class boys.

But the problem is refusing to understand that both interpretations can be true at once; I think one thing that really damaged Holden’s reputation in pop culture is when he was propped up as a sort of savior, a James Dean rebel-without-a-cause thoroughly enlightened and aspirational when he’s not. He’s a young teenager who doesn’t know how to grieve the death of his little brother because he’s not allowed to grieve. He wants to escape being an adult because he sees adult masculinity as an unforgivable transformation. But he doesn’t know how to escape the inevitable and thus just wanders, aimless, struggling to articulate himself and feeling inadequate and resentful when others point out how empty he is. 

The Catcher in the Rye is an exhausting fave of mine and Holden Caufield remains one of my favorite protagonists, not because I think he’s some great aspirational role model of masculinity, but because I find him deeply compelling and sympathetic, as he struggles and fails to find his place in the world. I was compelled by the sort of ticker-tape narrative of Holden’s head, that’s going in circles towards memories and fantasies and fears. I understood the paranoia about illness and injury, the way a preoccupation with death pervades his thoughts. I understood it as being one of the best books to explain what it feels like to survive something awful while still being broken. So I remember being shocked when I’d learned that many people who’d encountered Holden hated him. “He doesn’t have anything to be depressed about,” one of my high school classmates said while a college friend said, “He’s so annoying.” Those are what the critiques are commonly centered around: he’s annoying and he’s spoiled. The Catcher in the Rye inspires immediate revulsion in most pop culture, with the story of an adolescent struggling with depression misrepresented or else fully diminished. 

But recently the tides have been turning in favor of Holden once again. After a popular Youtuber made a video criticizing Holden as nothing more than a spoiled, whiny brat, many twitter users jumped to Holden’s defense. These tweets attacked the lack of compassion people offer Holden, a depressed teenager lost in the world of adults and their machinations, powerless against various systems. Mostly, people are pointing out that Holden’s trauma is severely minimized in the pop culture psyche, seemingly forgetting all that he’s suffered throughout his life.

“Catcher In The Rye discourse is always fun because it boils down to "this teenager going through a horrible time is whiny", one user tweeted while another tweeted, “Holden’s 15 and his little brother died and he went to a teacher for help only to get possibly groomed can we give the kid a f***ing break?” Writer Zack Budryk tweeted “Catcher in the Rye discourse is always fun as a depressed sexual assault victim because you get to see how many people think that kind of person is really annoying and should just shut up,” and writer Lauren Houghe tweeted, “If I were Holden Caulfield, a suicidal kid whose brother had died and I turned to the one adult I trusted and he molested me I would’ve been a lot more positive and less sad about the experience.”

There were plenty more, varying from comedic to indignant. But the core message was the same: for all the critiques and criticisms and accusations thrown towards Catcher, none afforded Holden an ounce of empathy. None seem capable of offering empathy. 

In Leslie Jamison’s essay “The Empathy Exams” (Is it a Juliette essay if I didn’t mention LJ?), she writes about how nuanced the concept of empathy actually is. People want to be empathetic, because empathy is associated with kindness, but empathy can also require a sort of exhaustive interrogation. She writes:

“Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see…Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries... Empathy demands another kind of porousness in response.”

I bring this quote up because this definition of empathy can understand the wider problems that come with Catcher readings: many people don’t want to inquiry Holden deeper. There’s a knee-jerk reaction to dismiss what he does say as overdramatic and even embellished (and honestly, that’s not just a problem Holden has. In general there’s an instinct to assume that people, especially teenagers, are being ‘dramatic’ and thus can be ignored. God help the person who’s dramatic.)

Not only do many of the critiques refuse to read deeper into Holden’s story, any don’t even  meaningfully address or even acknowledge what the story is about. So, what exactly is Holden’s story? 

To answer that, let’s review all the information he’s offered about his life in chronological order, in a sorta David-Copperfield manner that Holden would probably resent. This will double as my synopsis and I’ll try to be quick; I’ve been told by various writing instructors that I spend too much time describing plots. 

Holden grew up in New York City and is the second oldest of four children. His oldest brother DB have a bit of an age gap, considering that DB is in his 20s and Holden’s still 16 when Catcher begins, but Holden used to admire him a lot. Holden was also close with his younger brother and his youngest sister. He’s said that throughout his childhood, about ‘twenty times’ he’d been molested, but doesn’t name any one abuser. When Holden was 13, his brother Allie, then 11, died of leukemia. Holden was so distraught over Allie’s death that he broke his own hand punching out the garage windows of their summer home and subsequently was forced to miss Allie’s funeral. DB moved out to Hollywood around this time. Simultaneously, Holden’s parents decide to send Holden to boarding school. While he’s at Pencey Prep, his classmate dies after falling out the window of their dorm. Holden saw his mangled corpse wearing a sweater that Holden had just lent him.

When the story begins Holden’s at Pencey Prep, his fourth boarding school in three years- he keeps failing out of his other schools. Now he’s been expelled from Pencey for failing most of his classes. He’s pretty indifferent to his situation, since he hates his classmates anyway, and decides to ditch early and take a train to New York, staying in a hotel and wandering until his parents will. There he wanders around, drinking and smoking and trying to find someone to spend time with. At one point he’s accosted by a pimp who convinces to pay for a prostitute. Holden agrees and immediately regrets, offering to still pay her but asking her to leave him alone. She complains that Holden didn’t pay enough and sends the pimp back up, who yells at and punches Holden until Holden starts crying. The next day he calls Sally, a peer to spend the day with. They go ice-skating and have fun, but then Holden becomes angry and starts ranting against society. Sally pulls back from him. Holden impulsively invites her to run away to the woods with him and she declines. They angrily part ways. Holden meet up with another classmate, Carl, at a bar and thinks that Carl is secretly gay. Carl tells Holden to see a therapist to better understand himself (and I promised myself I wouldn’t editorialize in the synopsis, but that’s the smartest thing anyone has said and will say in this entire book.) Then Holden sneaks into his apartment so that he can see his little sister. Phoebe is at first overjoyed to see him, only to realize that he’d been expelled. She chastises Holden for being aimless and hating everything, and Holden shares a fantasy he has with her about being the ‘catcher in the rye’, watching over children that play in a field and catching them before they can fall to their deaths. She asks if he likes anything and he says he likes Allie. Holden then goes to his favorite English teachers’ home, and his teacher allows Holden to spend the night, after expressing that he thinks Holden is headed for a ‘terrible fall’. While Holden is sleeping, Mr. Antolini starts stroking Holden’s hair. Holden panics, interpreting it as a sexual advance, and leaves, spending the night at Grand Central Station. 

Holden decides to run away again out west and stops by Phoebe’s school to say goodbye. Phoebe wants to go with him, but he refuses and instead takes her to Central Park. Phoebe happily rides the carousel and Holden, so overwhelmed with happiness at the sight of her riding the carousel, breaks down crying. The story flashes forward to Holden concluding that he’d run into his parents that night and had ‘gotten sick.’ He mentions that he will start a new school in September and then concludes that he’s going to stop talking, because talking about all that has happened has only made him miss everyone.

I have so much that I want to talk about with this book and I have so little time. I decided that this essay will focus on the Pencey Prep characters and I think Stradlater is a great place to start. 

Stradlater is Holden’s roommate at Pencey. He’s good-looking and athletic, and Holden finds him to be a pig. When we first see Stradlater, he’s about to go on a date with Jane, one of Holden’s childhood friends. Holden perks up at the mention of Jane, asking about her and clearly missing her. Stradlater is indifferent to Holden, seems indifferent to Jane as anything more than a one-off date, and leaves. When Stradlater comes back that night and insinuates that he and Jane had sex, Holden is so distressed that he “tried to sock (Stradlater) with all (Holden’s) might” out of anger.” 

I’ve seen many discussions where this passage is often read as Holden either being jealous or wanting to protect Jane’s virginity. I think these are true, considering that part of what Holden was yelling about was that Stradlater didn’t care about Jane enough to even remember what her name was.

However, I haven’t seen many passages analyze what comes in the next chapter when Holden, miserable about the idea of Jane and Stradlater together, thinks “The trouble was, I knew that guy Stradlater's technique. That made it even worse.”

What is Stradlater’s technique? Well, the sex is technically consensual but only after manipulating, prodding, and coercing. Holden remembers being on a double date with Stradlater once and hearing he technique in action: “(Stradlater would) start snowing his date in this very quiet, sincere voice—like,as if he wasn’t only a very handsome guy but a nice, sincere guy, too...his date kept saying, ‘No—please. Please, don’t. Please.’ But old Stradlater kept snowing her in this Abraham Lincoln, sincere voice, and finally, there’d be this terrific silence in the back of the car.”

Stradlater doesn’t think he’s done anything wrong because technically he didn’t; he didn’t force himself on her physically. The description reminds me a bit of the #metoo claims leveled against comedian Aziz Ansari, claims which marked a crucial divide at the height of the #metoo era. The story goes that an anonymous woman went on a date with Ansari, where she felt repeatedly pressured and coerced into having sex with him. The story became quite controversial, some arguing it over simplified sexual assault while others felt it shined a light on the nuances of consent. A Vox article describes it as:

A man repeatedly pushing sex without noticing (or without caring about) what she wants — is something many, many women have experienced in encounters with men. And while few men have committed the litany of misdeeds of which Weinstein has been accused, countless men have likely behaved as Grace says Ansari did — focusing on their own desires without recognizing what their partner wants.

Perhaps Stradlater’s behavior gets diminished because what he did feels quite ordinary. When it happened in front of Holden on the double date, he seemed more confused and uncomfortable than anything else. Honestly, the entire concept of sexual consent seems to confuse him; not because he doesn’t understand it, but because here’s such a widespread disregard for it. Holden says that the only reason why he’s a virgin is because when he’s making out with a girl and she asks him to stop, he stops; “most guys don’t. I can’t help it (though), you never know whether they really want you to stop or whether they're just scared as hell, or whether they're just telling you to stop so that if you do go through with it, the blame'll be on you, not them. Anyway, I keep stopping.”

And this passage right here, I think ties back quite well to Holden’s fear of growing up. There seems to be this essentialist quality about maturing a a an that makes one do horrible things, and he’s scared of that happening to him. Already we see it influencing him- making him over-complicated what ‘stop’ means- and him trying to resist it by always stopping anyway.

Stradlater is an example of when Holden is actually making a compelling critique of society: namely that his type of behavior is rewarded and held as a pinnacle of masculine behavior when he is in fact smarmy at best and monstrous at worst.

The same could be said for most of the boys at Pencey Prep: they often manifest a type of violence and cruelty that disturbs Holden, a very specific masculine cruelty, that is either celebrated or else passively permitted. There’s no better example of the male pact violence in Catcher than the indirect homicide of James Castle.

High school English classes and Sparknotes might be tempted to categorize Castle’s death as a suicide but I don’t think it is and Holden doesn’t either. According to the text, James had been pushed into jumping to escape a group of bullies tormenting him in his room. 

“About six other dirty bastards went down to James Castle's room and went in and locked the goddam door and tried to make him take back what he said, but he wouldn't do it. So they started in on him. I won't even tell you what they did to him--it's too repulsive …(so James) jumped out the window ...there was old James Castle laying right on the stone steps and all ... his teeth, and blood, were all over the place, and nobody would even go near him. He had on this turtleneck sweater I'd lent him. All they did with the guys that were in the room with him was expel them. They didn't even go to jail.”

Let’s review: James was locked in his room, outnumbered by a group of stronger boys who were torturing him in some way, so James jumped out the window to get away. There’s nothing in that passage to suggest that James would have jumped out the window if the boys hadn’t been in the room torturing him with something ‘too repulsive’ to describe. No matter what that repulsive action was, whether it was being beaten or sodomized or what, we know it was so horrible that any sane person would be desperate to escape them. 

I’ve seen some argue that Holden admires James Castle. I don’t think he does; I think he mourns James Castle’s unjust death. He doesn’t frame James’ death as a triumph, or as James’ responsibility. It was the fault of the boys in the room, and that’s why Holden is particularly disgusted that they weren’t tried and sent to prison. The entire case was swept under the rub, santized into being an unfortunate suicide within the world of the text and, in some cruel irony, rewritten as nothing more than an unfortunate suicide in the public conscious.

Suffice to say that Holden doesn’t have any friends from Pencey. Just about everyone at that school disgusts him.

Before Holden leaves Pencey for good, he visits his history teacher, Mr. Spencer. Mr. Spencer requested this visit, so that they could say goodbye. The conversation begins with Mr. Spencer interrogating Holden about failing out of Pencey, what his parents would think, and what Holden thought of the whole situation. Holden responds politely and awkwardly, thinking that he wants to leave because he can feel “a terrific lecture coming on.” Mr. Spencer’s tone turns sarcastic as he asks if Holden ever read their history textbook, even though Holden just admitted knowing none of their curriculum. Finally Mr. Spencer makes Holden read from his last exam, where he’d written Mr. Spencer an apology and a go-ahead for failing him; “ It is all right with me if you flunk me though as I am flunking everything else except English anyway. Respectfully yours, HOLDEN CAULFIELD.”

 Holden tries to make him not read it aloud, embarrassed by himself, but Mr. Spencer proceeds and then rips Holden apart for being aimless and apathetic to his future; "You will (feel concern for your future)," old Spencer said. "You will, boy. You will when it's too late." I didn't like hearing him say that. It made me sound dead or something.”

Mr. Spencer seems to think Holden’s note was irreverent, but Holden had written it sincerely. I’ve known people who thought that the note was a bizarre thing to send a teacher; however I can say for certainty that not only did I write an apology note on a test I had failed, I’ve had several of my students write me apology notes on their math tests after realizing that they were going to fail. Most of them are rooted in guilt, thinking that they’re going to disappoint their teacher by failing.

Holden wants his teacher to know that Holden’s failure is all Holden’s doing, and that there is no need for blame, integration, or to correct the error. Mostly Holden wants to exist on his own plane, without tests or grades or a pressure to think about a future that seems clouded by fog. Mr. Spencer is annoyed with Holden and repulsed by Holden’s seeming indifference. But he also insists that he wants to help Holden by “putting sense in that head.” Tough love, so to speak, and the first adult to offer Holden a semblance of guidance. But Holden,  embarrassed by Mr. Spencer’s sarcasm and nasty tone, and upset when Mr. Spencer refuses to agree that Holden’s simply going through a ‘phase’, quickly excuses himself to leave. He hears Mr. Spencer call after him “good luck” which upsets Holden greatly; “it sounds terrible, when you think about it.” Basically, as much as Holden wants to continue in his ways, indifferent and self-contained, he is a little bit aware of the misery he’s heading for. He wants the reassurance that he’s allowed to be static without damaging himself. He’s afraid of being responsible for himself so he chooses inaction, and the knowledge that ‘inaction’ (or passivity) is its own negative action is almost too much to bear

The second adult who offers any semblance of guidance for Holden is Mr. Antolini, his former English teacher. Mr. Antolini is also the teacher that then violated the trust Holden had for him when Holden was at his lowest, by grooming Holden as Holden slept. 

Now, the entire scene and Mr. Antolini’s intent is actually quite ambiguous and subsequently, interpretations can be quite controversial. Diligent readers will remember earlier in this essay, many tweets cited defending Holden say that Mr. Antolini either groomed or molested Holden. Others have argued that Holden misinterpreted Mr. Antolini’s gesture, that Holden’s either too guarded or too dense to recognize a gesture of fatherly support. So let’s take a moment to review, just what exactly happened?

Well, Holden shows up to Mr. Antolini’s doorstep one night and Mr. Antolini answers the door in a bathrobe and slippers, highball in one hand. “He was a pretty sophisticated guy, and he was a pretty heavy drinker”, Holden notes to the audience. Mr. Antolini happily lets him in and bemusedly asks why Holden flunked out of Pencey. The scene is like a foil to the opening chapter with Mr. Spencer. Both scenes take place in the teachers' homes, with their wives in nearby rooms. Both teachers are presented intimately, right down to being in bathrobes. But where Mr. Spencer was sickly, Mr. Antolini is healthy and robust; where Mr. Spencer was disappointed, Mr. Antolini is amused. Both recognize Holden’s failures and seem to want him to improve, but Mr. Spencer is tough love while Mr. Antolini feels like a friend. 

Holden starts feeling “sort of dizzy or something, and… had a helluva headache all of a sudden” as they spoke, which makes sense given that Holden’s spent the last few days drinking and smoking heavily while barely sleeping. Mrs. Antolini presents the two with coffees, seems to ignore Holden’s conversation, and then goes off to bed. Mr. Antolini, still in pleasant conversation, starts grilling Holden about his class performance and Holden starts feeling sicker and sicker. 

Then he said, "Frankly, I don't know what the hell to say to you, Holden." 

"I know. I'm very hard to talk to. I realize that." 

"I have a feeling that you're riding for some kind of a terrible, terrible fall. But I don't honestly know what kind. . . Are you listening to me?”

While Holden felt alert and anxious with Mr. Spencer, he seems to be falling inward with Mr. Antolini. Mr. Antolini warns Holden that he’s on the verge of a fall,

“A special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn't permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement's designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn't supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn't supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started….I don't want to scare you, but I can very clearly see you dying nobly, one way or another, for some highly unworthy cause." 

There’s so much to unpack in this speech-and honestly, in Mr. Antolini’s chapter- that it could probably be its own essay but I’ll keep it suffice here: Mr. Antolini is, better than anyone else, identifying what Holden is going through. He’s identifying the way Holden’s trauma has manifested into a static restlessness, exhaustively and pointlessly searching for some meaning that they can’t find. 

But again, while Holden was anxious and defensive with Mr. Spencer, he barely seems to register what Mr. Antolini is saying to him at the moment. His internal beats of narration consistently focus on how he feels tired and sick, and Mr. Antolini’s speech just seems to push him further inside himself. When Mr. Antoloni begins gushing that Holden is an academic at heart, and should pursue a career in academia, Holden yawns and finally Mr. Antolini lets him go to bed. While they make the bed together, Mr. Antolini asks Holden about his girlfriends, parts ways (“Good night, Handsome”) and forgot to lend Holden nightclothes so Holden goes to bed in his boxers.  

Now we’re already in a lot of ambiguity surrounding Mr. Antolini’s intentions- is he fawning over Holden, or trying to show Holden support? Is that bit about girlfriends and Holden's looks just lighthearted teasing or flirting?- but one thing isn’t ambiguous: just about every boundary of a healthy student/teacher relationship has been violated here. From the bathrobe to the heavy drinking to telling a minor you essentially think they’re going to kill themselves to not just looking at the obviously hungover and depressed child and thinking that hey, maybe you should just call their parents and let them know what’s going on? 

None of this is appropriate. A teacher caught doing this today would absolutely lose their license. 

Now let’s move into the controversial question: did Mr. Antolini make a sexual advance at Holden?

Well, Holden definitely thinks he did. “I don’t even like to talk about it” Holden says before explaining that he woke up to Mr. Antolini touching his hair: 

 “He was sitting on the floor right next to the couch, in the dark and all, and he was sort of petting me or patting me on the goddam head. Boy, I'll bet I jumped about a thousand feet. "What the hellya doing?" I said. 

"Nothing! I'm simply sitting here, admiring--" 

"What're ya doing, anyway?" I said over again. I didn't know what the hell to say- -I mean I was embarrassed as hell. 

"How 'bout keeping your voice down? I'm simply sitting here--" 

"I have to go, anyway," I said--boy, was I nervous! I started putting on my damn pants in the dark. I could hardly get them on I was so damn nervous. I know more damn perverts, at schools and all, than anybody you ever met, and they're always being perverty when I'm around.”

Holden’s narrative voice is defined by having constant interruptions and circle backs and adjectives and qualifiers, but this scene is particularly frazzled, like he’s stammering over his words in real time. It’s also worth remembering that the whole premise of Catcher is that Holden is writing down the story in a journal, going off of his own memories; he remembered Mr. Antolini saying the word “admiring” before Holden cut him off. From that word forward, Holden wouldn’t let Mr. Antolini finish explaining himself; he just instantly knew that he wanted to leave. 

They argue over Holden leaving, Mr. Antolini telling Holden that he’s acting ridiculous and to go back to bed. Holden realizes that Mr. Antolini is still drinking, sitting in a chair now, watching Holden dress, and saying “You're a very, very strange boy."

“All he said was that business about my being a "very, very strange boy" again. Strange, my ass.” 

Holden manages to leave, but doesn’t calm down. He’s sweating and thinks “when something perverty like that happens, I start sweating like a bastard. That kind of stuff's happened to me about twenty times since I was a kid. I can't stand it.”

So! Let’s talk this scene through backwards.

The last part is arguably the most important detail: Holden says that he’s been a victim of child sexual abuse. That alone can explain why Mr. Antolini’s actions triggered such a large reaction out of Holden, and why Holden has a constant preoccupation and evasion towards sex. It’s common trauma response for sexually abused children: retreat so deeply into denial that one denies that sex even exists, or else oversexualize everything. 

It also again cannot be stated enough that Catcher is Holden’s journal, meaning Holden is the one who decides what he does and doesn’t tell. I don’t think it’s a stretch to wonder if Holden may be leaving certain details out, or trying to minimize or shapeshift them to make it more palatable, if not for an audience than for him. After all, he said himself just now that he doesn’t even want to talk about this night

But assuming Holden gave us the whole, honest truth, then let’s ask: was Mr. Antolini making a sexual advance towards Holden?

I can understand that there’s plausible deniability in Mr. Antolini’s case. When I was discussing this scene with an MFA instructor, he warned me that referring to this scene as abuse isn’t “inaccurate so much as a simplification of what transpired with Mr. Antolini, whose touch is surely inappropriate but may not have had a sexual intention.” Which is a point I understand and would mostly agree with if it wasn’t for Mr. Antolini’s immediate response to Holden’s panic: he  denies that he’s doing anything wrong, verbally attacks Holden for wanting to leave, and then repeatedly states that Holden’s a “strange strange boy,” who can’t perceive reality.  

It’s such an abuser tactic. 

No matter what Mr. Antolini’s intent was, his actions terrified Holden and caused him to run off to sleep in Grand Central Station. In the morning, Holden feels even sicker and starts feeling guilty for leaving, wondering if it was possible that Mr. Antolini really meant no harm by it. When Holden starts walking, he starts having what seems to be a panic attack, “this feeling that I'd never get to the other side of the street. I thought I'd just go down, down, down, and nobody'd ever see me again. Boy, did it scare me. You can't imagine”

The only thing that manages to ground him or at least comfort, is pretending he can talk to Allie again: “Every time I'd get to the end of a block I'd make believe I was talking to my brother Allie. I'd say to him, "Allie, don't let me disappear. Allie, don't let me disappear. Allie, don't let me disappear. Please, Allie."

His plea is heartbreaking. Holden walks away from most interactions either feeling righteous or wronged, but when it comes to Allie, he can’t feel anything but a hollow sadness. 

It’s also interesting that for all the times that Holden was preoccupied with his own death in this book-like when he imagines being shot or jumping out a window or having a brain tumor- the thing that actually terrifies him is simply disappearing. Or maybe not interesting; it’s telling. He’s spent so much time shrinking into himself, wandering and aimless, and seeming apathetic to how this was all a form of self-destruction.  He wants to keep moving but it’s all becoming too real; it being his self-awareness. While he’s in many ways internalized, or at least learned how to practice, the masculine code of trauma, it’s getting more and more difficult for him to keep his feelings buried deep inside. 

This feels as good of a place as any to stop for now. Stay tuned for part 2 which will come out…eventually.